imw— — i watarmm mm lrnTT* 







Mm 


1 : ' 





$'£: 






.**: "••?*? 









■ 



■ 



i 



H 



^M| 



-a 






■ 



1 



HI 11 






■ ■ HXEKaDS 

AH hSEbS 

H 

EH 



■ 



THE DAYS OF OFELIA 



They worshipped a goddess of the earth who was 
also the goddess of the corn, and they called her 
by a name which means: that which sustains us. 

CLAVIGERO: ANCIENT HISTORY OF MEXICO 



Among their foods the first place must be given to 
corn, the grain which Providence granted to that 
part of the world in place of the wheat of Europe. 
With corn the Mexicans make tortillas, or round 
flat pancakes, a bread which is different from that 
of Europe in taste, shape, and in the manner of 
making it. The Mexicans and all the other peoples 
of that vast part of the world had the custom of eat- 
ing tortillas, and to this very day it is their custom. 

CLAVIGERO : ANCIENT HISTORY OF MEXICO 



«*»**;■"■ »^* 





Illustrated by 
John O'Hara Cosgrave EC 



Publishers since 1812 _/Vt4 

Bl ackett limited 



***sr 4 fer , __ .iP^ 




BOOK 
PRODUCTION 
WAR ECONOMY 

STANLWD 



*z 






THE TYPOGRAPHY AND BINDING OF THIS BOOK 
CONFORM TO THE AUTHORIZED ECONOMY STANDARD 



FOR 
MOLLIE and MICHAEL 



$? f& 



First published in Great Britain 1942 



Mad« and Printed In Great Britain at 

gjreycaines 
(Taylor Garnett Evans & Co. Led.) 



Watford. H*m 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

i. Atoyag 82 . ■ .• . . . . . . 7 

2. Skulls — Two for Five . . . ■. . . . 11 

3. I Feel Like an Aviator . . . . . . 17 

4. Meet Me at the Little Angel . . . . . 25 

5. To Eat with Confidence ...... 32 

6. 'Allo Good-bye . . . . . . . .40 

7. Si, No Hay . . . . 45 

8. Rain-scape ......... 52 

g. 'From This We Must Forge a Nation' .... 58 

10. The Stupid Otomis ....... 67 

ill. Do You Know the Highway? . . . . . 76 

12. Bitter Bread ........ 83 

13- Juchitan Wedding. . 89 

14. The Little White Bird. ...... 104 

15. Daniel . . . . . . . . . .114 

16. And Another Wedding . . . . . .125 



ATOYAC 82 

The street behaved just like a river. It rambled through empty 
lots and circled a field of corn, and then it disappeared. There 
was a high white wall where it disappeared, but not a sign or 
a person to tell me where the street had gone. Presently a boy on 
a bicycle came by, and seeing me standing in perplexity, he waved 
and called: "Follow the wall." I followed it, and there was the 
street again. 

I was looking for Atoyac, Number 82, where the morning paper 
said there was a furnished apartment — cheap, comfortable, decent, 
ideal for an American. And I was in that part of Mexico City where 
all the streets bear the names of rivers. Already I had crossed the 
Tiber, the Rhine, and the River Po, old favourites familiar from 
high-school days. But what of the River Atoyac? Nobody knew 
where it was, and nobody seemed to have heard of it. The sun was 
high and the sidewalk burned my feet, and I wandered on, hoping 
that the street would not disappear again. For I was carrying the 
two big valises which I had brought with me to Mexico, and which 
now contained all that I owned in the world. 

It was a way of burning my bridges behind me. I was tired of 
living in boarding-houses (those beautiful old colonial mansions of 
the guide-books), with their damp, dark rooms, slippery floors, and 
dreadful furniture. I had vowed never to enter another old colonial 
mansion, but to leave them all to their decaying splendours and to 
the Spartan Mexicans. And if there was no place in the city with an 
easy-chair and a comfortable bed and dry and sunny, then I would 
go back to the States. But I did not want to go back, either. There 
are three hundred thousand Otomi Indians in Mexico, and I had 
tested a mere one hundred. I must test another two hundred at least 
to prove — but no, it is not scientific to know in advance what one 
is going to prove. 

I put my valises down, flexed my arms, and looked around. There 
were houses now, but not a sign to tell me if I had come to the River 
Atoyac. To know where you are in Mexico City, you must look at 
the corner houses; and with luck you will see a tiny plaque which 
bears the name of the street. But usually it isn't there at all, and the 
Mexicans have a sweet reasonableness when they cannot enlighten 
you, "Pues . . . you see, sefiorita, the signs are missing which should 
bear the names of the streets, So I cannot tell you, sefiorita, forgive 



8 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

me." It was Sunday, and the stores were closed and the street deserted. 
I left my valises and walked until I came to where a man was sitting 
on the kerb. He looked up from under a wide sombrero. "No, 
senorita," he said, "really I cannot tell you. I have little time here." 
'Time!' I thought scornfully. 'What time do you need to tell me the 
name of a street?' And then I remembered my still meagre Spanish. 
It is an idiom, meaning that one has only just come to a place. "But 
if you ask the senor at the little stand over there," he went on, "possibly 
he can tell you. He has much time here." So I crossed to the little stand. 

"Atoyac!" mused the man of much time. "Atoyac!" He smiled 
engagingly. "Forgive me, senorita, but I am unable to say. I do 
not concentrate on the names of the streets. However, if you should 
wish for the Street of the River of the Plata" — he pointed with an 
exquisite grace — "it is over there, senorita, just two blocks over there." 
"Thank you," I said, "I do not wish for the Street of the River of 
the Plata." And I went back, gathered my valises, and wandered 
on. There were empty lots again, and many blocks where the houses 
were still being built. Soon I would come to the city limits. I could 
see fields of corn and beyond them the mountains, splendidly 
luminous in the afternoon light. But at the last corner before the 
fields began I came to a house that miraculously bore the number 82. 
Five little girls sat on the doorstep. 

"Is there a furnished apartment here?" 

They chorused raggedly, pointing: "Arriba . . . upstairs." And 
I saw that they all had the same shade of brown-green eyes. Then 
they rose in a body and we all went up. 

I could not tell in that mass of brown arms and legs and serious 
faces that escorted me upstairs which one was Ofelia. But at the top 
of the stairs one child detached herself, took a bunch of keys from 
under her apron, and turning, waved her hand at the others with 
a royal gesture, as who should say: 'Away, O profane ones! Efface 
yourselves.' 

The other little girls turned as one and slunk down the stairs 
again, submissive as lambs. Then she of the keys opened the door. 
"I have such trouble with them, senora," she said, sighing. "They 
are very presuming children. I alone am supposed to show the apart- 
ment, but they always come up with me. If you should wish to see 
it again, please ask for Ofelia. Ofelia Escoto, at your service." 

But I knew in one glance that I had found my home. It must 
have been the casement windows that decided me, and the way the 
rooms made a corner so that I could spy on myself, a nice diversion 
for one who lives alone. And there were two 'closts', rare in any 
Mexican apartment, and I would not have to go to the market to 
buy those hideous guarda-ropas, which come from the time of the 
Count of Monte Gristo. Ofelia must have noticed my pleased ex- 



ATOYAG 82 9 

pression, for she ran to the window. "Ramona, Lupita, Cristina, 
Elodia," she called. "Run and call father. The senorita will speak 
to him." 

There was a chorus of 'Si's' and the sound of a stampede, and I 
gathered that the herd had been waiting obediently under the window 
for just such a signal. Presently Ofelia's father came, followed by 
all the children, who now entered fearlessly as under a higher authority. 
Sefior Escoto had very blue eyes. It was the first thing you noticed 
about him, and the thing you would always remember about him. It 
was a deep blue, untamed and challenging, and when he looked at 
me sideways and smiled with the very white teeth that Mexicans have, 
I found myself thinking, inevitably, 'Handsome devil. 5 Only his 
smile was soft and lazy, and I liked him because it contradicted the 
fierce blaze of his eyes. It was very easy to arrange things with him, 
because all he did was to smile and say softly, "Yes, that can be 
arranged." Meanwhile, the children stood by with their hands 
behind their backs, and I thought how there must have been a Scotch 
ancestor, perhaps far back, who had given them their name of Escoto. 
But the Scotch blue had skipped the children, or at least it had com- 
promised with the Indian black to give them those bronze, brown- 
green eyes. 

Ofelia was the last of the children to go, and Sefior Escoto waved 
her away with the same imperious gesture she had used on her little 
sisters. "Sefiora, you must forgive me for Ofelia," he said earnestly. 
"Do not let her bother you. She is a very presuming child." 

Then they were gone. Only the door opened again, and Ofelia 
put her head in. "Sdnora," she whispered sibilantly, "when you wish 
for a maid, remember me. Ofelia Escoto, at your service." She 
closed the door lingeringly and I turned back to the apartment. But 
the windows drew me, flooded with a blue so clear that I had to go 
and look down on the lot below, to make sure I was not floating 
through space. The Escoto children were playing there, and from 
somewhere came the music of a harmonica and the sound of metal 
clinking, over and over again. At the far end of the lot men were 
playing a game, tossing a little piece of metal into a cupped stone. 
It was late, yet the day still lingered, the long golden Mexican day 
which seems as though it could never die. In the morning it lifts the 
spirit, but in the late afternoon, when the air is saturated with golden 
light and unmoving as if it had stopped breathing, one feels a great 
sadness — the weight of time, a premonition of eternity. That sadness 
I felt now, looking out on the lingering day while it grew dark in the 
apartment where I was not yet at home, and very much alone. And 
because I did not want to feel that sadness I quickly unpacked the 
valises and spread the intelligence tests on the desk. And very soon 
I was checking and adding and dividing, figuring I.Q,'s for the Otomi 
Indians. 



SKULLS— TWO FOR FIVE n 



SKULLS — TWO FOR FIVE 

In Mexico you must have a maid if you wish to be considered a 
person of consequence. Someone who does the washing on the 
roof, while she sings at the top of her voice and the sun makes 
splendid ebony of her hair, and who bargains with the butcher and 
who fetches your tortillas, and goes to market for you. I had no 
maid, and so I did the marketing myself, going out every morning 
with a basket and a bag swinging from my arm. It was the wrong 
thing to do. In the corner grocery Manolo and his wife, leaning 
elbows on the counter, gave me good morning as I passed; but their 
eyes followed me disapprovingly, and I am sure they thought: of 
these Americans any queerness may be expected. 

But how could I explain to them my great delight in going to 
market, or tell them that it was circus and holiday, theatre and fair 
and folklore to me ? The market of the Merced is on the other side 
of town, a long bus ride from Atoyac 82. But I preferred it because 
it is such a large market, a city in itself where one can wander and 
get lost. And it has infinite variety — green glass from Monterrey, 
and baskets from Toluca, and sombreros from every State in Mexico ; 
and sandals hanging from the stalls like meats being cured, and 
leathers and cloths from Tlaxcala, besides every fruit that grows in 
Mexico, and every herb for medicine or witchcraft. 

You cross the Great Plaza and go east, in the direction where the 
volcanos show on a clear day; and even before you come to the 
market there are covered stalls, and the cries begin. "Buy, marchante, 
choose! What were you looking for, what did you desire?" A mar- 
chante, I take it, is one who marches around presumably looking for 
a bargain. "What do you need, marchante, what will you carry 
home? A bargain, a bargain, take advantage!" It is an endless 
litany, soft and cajoling. "Buy, my little blonde one, buy, my 
pretty one! I bring oranges from Cordoba, let's see if they please 
you." 

Then comes the market proper — the difficult walking between the 
stalls, the dusty air and the slippery dirt, the smell of tortillas frying 
in bubbling fat, and the smell of leather and grass mats still green ; 
and the din of strolling musicians and the whine of beggars, and the 
cries of the cargadores bent double under huge bags of produce, 
blindly charging through the crowd. "Make way! Make way!" 

The church where the prostitutes come to pray to their patron 
saint is near the market, where the stalls end in a slum more terrible 



ia THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

than any in Mexico City. But before you come to the church there 
is a chapel, where the women come to spend a moment out of the 
sun, and to say some prayer that they have in mind. It has a terrify- 
ingly realistic Christ who sits leaning forward, the beads of blood 
bright on his waxen cheek, and one pale hand uplifted in the twilight 
air. I remember the chapel because I took refuge there on the Day 
of the Dead. I had made the mistake of going out bareheaded on a 
clear day and very soon I felt dizzy; for -the Mexican sun is no pleasant 
benediction like our northern sun, but a fierce stroke of consuming 
light. Still, I did not want to turn back. The gleaming gay skulls, 
sugary-white and with splendid gold trimmings, lured me on, and I 
walked farther and farther into the market, bewitched by the cries 
of the women: "Skulls, skulls — two for five." I thought of buying 
a skull and having my picture taken, holding it in the crook of my 
arm like some medieval alchemist. Nobody would have thought it 
strange, on that day, if I had wandered through the city carrying a 
skull. For the whole city is given over to death, and there is feasting 
in the cemeteries and everywhere there are dancing skeletons, and 
pastries and candy take the shape of skeletons as naturally as our 
gingerbread takes the shape of Santa Claus. You cannot even open 
the paper without seeing skulls. All the famous men from the President 
down are pictures with fleshless grins, and someone writes very nasty 
epitaphs for them. It is a day for morbid joys and gruesome delights, 
for death casts its jigging ribaldry over everything. 

But not a day for walking in the sun. I was beginning to feel sick 
from the smell of burning copal, the incense of the ancient Aztecs, 
with which they perfumed the stench of their human sacrifices. And 
the skulls no longer stayed in the stalls, but began to rise and float 
around me like balloons, and I felt myself rising, too, and all of us 
jigging like motes in a sunbeam to the cry of "Two for five, two for 
five." Somewhere, I thought, there must be shade, where I can find 
reality again and escape from these white skull-bones. But there was 
no shade, only the merciless sun, chalk- white on the awnings over the 
stalls, sugar-white on the skulls that floated around me. 

I saw brown hands moulding cool ices of a poisonous febrile pink, 
and brown hands extended strange fruits to me with seductive cries. 
"Buy, my pretty one. Buy, my little blonde one." But they were the 
ices and fruits of death, sweet and poisonous, and I floated past them 
and smilingly rejected them with a wave of my hand. At which the 
skulls that floated with me also smiled; for while they were thus 
cheated of me for a time, at least I continued to suffer a fiery thirst, 
and that pleased them. I remember in particular one skull with the 
name Guadalupe beautifully inscribed on her white forehead in red 
icing. I had seen her first in a stall with some other female skulls — 
Ramona, Esmeralda, and Eusebia; and she seemed to have joined 
my floating escort and taken the lead, a merry wench, if a bit unfleshly. 



SKULLS— TWO FOR FIVE 13 

It must have been high noon, for there was no shade anywhere, 
and I longed for a church, a dim Christian interior to absolve me 
from the sun. There, I knew, the skulls must disappear, for clearly 
they were demons of the fierce Mexican sun and in the dark they 
could not exist. By now Thad come to the slum, and beggars stretched 
their stumps of arms toward me, and the lazars, the blind, and the 
maimed streamed past me, phantasma stepped out of some medieval 
painting. The buildings, too, were fantastic. They leaned gently 
awry, sinking into the earth. Mexico is built on a filled-in lake, and 
old buildings with poor foundations sink slowly into the swampy ground. 
It was a nice cool note to remember from the guide-books, and I 
hoped it was so. For if not, I was quite mad. But I remembered also 
what one of the Spanish conquerors had written : that the stench of 
human sacrifices in the Aztec temples was so great that his nostrils 
could not abide it. Surely that blood-thirst of the ancient Aztecs had 
not died out, but still claimed its living victims. I was convinced of 
it, and already imagined the headlines: gringa dies of sunstroke 
in the merced market. And then I came to the chapel and went 
in, and leaned against the cold marble wall, while the air whirled 
around me and whirled the waxen Christ, with his pale hand lifted 
in reproof. The women there had put their market bags aside to kneel 
and pray, but they looked at me slyly while their lips moved. They 
were all decently shawled in long black rebozos. And as I went out 
one of them said to me, gently rebukeful: "Yes, one must cover the 
head." 

Whenever I went to market Ofelia watched me. The Escotos 
lived in a hut on the lot next to the house, and I had to pass it to 
take the bus. One day she waylaid me. 

"Seiiora, you are going to market," she said, respectfully accusing. 
"I, too, wish to go." 

Since in dealing with children precedent is everything, I at once 
said no very firmly, and then thought of all the reasons for it. I was 
in a hurry, the market was far away, there would be heavy things 
to carry. 

"I will help you carry them," she said. 

"No, there's a little boy in the market who helps me." 

"Ah, seiiora," she sighed. "Those rascals. They are shameless 
ones. They carry little and charge much. I will carry your things 
without payment. And as for the fare ..." She showed me a ticket 
she had found, good for one ride on the bus. "I have that, too." 

"It is not the fare," I said. 

Her eyes filled with tears. "But I long so to go." 

"What for?" 

"To buy something that pleases me." 

"And what pleases you?" 



14 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

"I don't know, sefiora. How can I tell? I would have to go to 
the market to find out." 

"Then why don't you go?" 

"There is no one to take me." 

"And your mother never goes?" 

"Never, sefiora. There is no occasion for it, because she lacks the 
money to buy things." 

"And your aunt, the young and pretty one?" 

"She, too, lacks the money. Besides, she says the market is very 
dirty." 

"Yes, it is very dirty." 

"But so many things! Ay, sefiora, what a mountain of things!" 
And she looked off into the distance, as if she could see the market 
and all its wonderful variety. 

I had to give myself for vanquished; as the Spanish says. "Come," 
I said, and took her hand. 

We did not return from the market until dark, for so many things 
pleased Ofelia that she could not make up her mind. We had explored 
all the stalls before the choice narrowed — a pair of blood-red earrings 
or the blue cotton drawers, both for thirty centavos. She bought the 
earrings with money she had earned carrying tortillas for the Sefiora 
D'Arce in the house. "But I am not her maid," she reassured me, 
"and so should you need me, sefiora . . ." 

After that I never went to market alone. I would wave my bag 
when I stepped out of the house, and Ofelia came flying like a bird 
to the signal, and took the bag from me. and off we went together. 
She insisted on carrying it even when it was full, swinging it up to 
her shoulder. And when we came home the spoils had to be disgorged 
at once, and we would congratulate ourselves on the cheapness of 
this or that, or deplore the high cost of something else. And there 
were always new fruits to savour, which Ofelia chose for me. She 
watched, very distraught, while I tried them, as if the future of the 
whole species depended on my verdict. But I liked everything except 
the mangoes, which have a musky rich after-taste not for my simple 
palate. 

Very soon Ofelia began to hint that it would be a fine thing if I 
let her go marketing alone. "A fine thing for you, sefiora," she said. 
"Then you could sit at your desk all day without interruption." 

"But your mother would never let you go so far alone," I told 
her, distractedly trying to concentrate on the intelligence tests. 

"Pues, it is far," she admitted, "but then if I were really your 
maid ..." 

"Child! You are too young to be a maid." 

"Oh, no, I am ten. And my sister Aurora, who bears very few 
years more than I, already has employment. If you would only 
speak to my mother ..." 



SKULLS— TWO FOR FIVE 15 

She leaned on the desk and looked with her head on one side at 
the drawings made by the Otomis. Problem: it is raining, draw the 
object which you use to protect yourself from the rain. Only it doesn't 
rain in the Valley of the Mesquite where the Otomis live, and the 
problem is how to get water, water to drink, and water for the soil. 

Ofelia nudged me gently. "Senora, if you would only speak to 
my mother ..." 

I had seen her mother often, but never spoken to her. She was 
tall, much taller than Senor Escoto, and in her long black skirt and 
black rebozo sheathing head and shoulders she looked like some figure 
from mythology. Whenever she met Senor Escoto on the street one 
could imagine that Fate herself had accosted him for the final reckon- 
ing. And usually he took a few coins from his pocket and reluctantly 
gave them to her. But one night Mrs. Escoto knocked at my door. 
In Mexico when you open the door to a neighbour you must at once 
bid him come in, come in, whether you know him or not. Never let 
him stand on the threshold, for the Mexicans consider it a dangerous 
and unhallowed place. So I bade Mrs. Escoto come in, and she 
apologized profusely for coming in, and it made a fine chorus all the 
way to the living-room. 

"You must forgive me, senora, for disturbing you," she began, 
"but it's about this Ofelia, here. She is a very presuming child. I 
have such trouble with her." Ofelia had come in, too, and stood 
with her hands behind her back, watching me intently from under 
her long lashes. "She says you have taken her for your maid and 
that I am to buy her an apron." 

"W^hy, no, we only go to market together." 

"There, you see?" Mrs. Escoto turned wrathfully on Ofelia. 
"The senora does not confirm your story. It is another one of your 
lies. Just imagine, we have not enough to eat in the house, and I 
was to go out and buy her an apron! Go!" — she waved Ofelia away. 
"Go, presuming one! You are not wanted here." 

Ofelia went out slowly, looking back at me with a beseeching 
urgency in her eyes, and I found myself saying, "But now that I 
remember — yes, we did talk of her being my maid. But not about 
the apron, of course. I will buy that for her myself." 

"Go!" Mrs. Escoto waved again, fiercely unsatisfied until Ofelia 
had quite disappeared. And then, to cover a change of mood, she 
rearranged her rebozo and smiled at me. "Ay, senora, the trouble 
I have with these children. One never knows what to believe. And 
they are growing up so wild, so wild here in the city. We are not of 
the city, senora. We are of Jalisco, from the pueblo of Atotonilco 
near Guadalajara. And we came here of necessity, so that we might 
live and have a shelter over us. Such a shelter as it is ! In our pueblo 
it would have served for the beasts." She sighed and looked around. 
"But here you are in glory, with such a wealth of things. In our little 



16 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

house in Atotonilco we, too, had a table and chairs and a bed, all 
that which makes the felicity of life. Ay, senora, what pleasure it is 
to have many things, many things as you have here." 

"Yet more than I need. Being alone . . ." 

"And look you, now we have two daughters to go out and work 
as servants. The sadness of it. Two daughters to be serving-maids. 
Aurora, who is thirteen, she already has employment, and Ofelia. 
Ofelia is ten. And what I wanted to ask you — what I came to find 
out — senora, could you give her a little salary, just a tiny little salary?" 

In Mexico the diminutive is so common, for flattery, for wheedling 
or for sheer adornment, that one never knows whether to take it 
seriously or not. So I felt called upon to explain. "It will have to 
be a tiny little salary in all truth. I could not give the child more 
than ten pesos a month." 

A purr of satisfaction escaped Mrs. Escoto before she shook her 
head. "Yes, that is little, to be sure. But then Ofelia is young, and 
as yet of little use." 

"And she will eat with me." 

Mrs. Escoto smiled deprecatingly. She had strong white teeth, 
but her gums were covered with red sores. "Ah, no, senora, I was not 
thinking of that. There is always something to eat in our house. 
Not much, but a mouthful can always be found." 

"She will eat with me," I insisted. And, as if the little salary 
had expanded visibly, Mrs. Escoto instructed me sternly: "And set 
her to work on her knees. Do not spare her, not for a moment. For 
she must learn, she must learn her trade, which is that of a serving- 
maid. Because look you, senora, we are not young — I and her father. 
I have a little one, Lolita — perhaps you have seen her? She can 
hardly walk yet, but for all that we are not young, we are well advanced 
in years. It is only that one goes on having children until the thing 
finishes itself. And if, God forbid, they should one day be left orphans 
..." She rose after a while, fate fully tall, and adjusted her rebozo 
and smiled at me. She had a gaunt prettiness, but it was ravaged by 
time and illness, and I thought there was something very sad about 
her. "And forgive me, senora, that I came to disturb you. But the 
child bothered me so. . . ." 

While we were preparing the supper that night, I asked Ofelia: 
"What do you eat in your home?" 

"Pues " She hesitated only because the answer seemed so 

obvious to her. "Pues," she said, "we eat tortillas." 

"Yes, but what do you have for breakfast?" 

"Tortillas." 

"And for lunch?" 

"Tortillas." 

"And for supper " 

"We do not eat supper, only Daniel and my father, because they 



I FEEL LIKE AN AVIATOR 17 

are men. But Daniel is not here now and so it is only my father. 
He eats the tortillas which are left over." 

"And are there many left over?" 

"It depends. You see, my mother gives me a peso in the morning 
and I buy two pounds of dough, and with it my mother and my aunts 
make the tortillas. Two pounds is not much, senora, and they finish 
quickly." 

"Yes, I see." 

"And then we are twelve, counting my little grandmother and 
my two aunts. There's my Aunt Delfina, her husband has left her, 
and my other aunt, who is very ill." 

"But do you never have anything else?" 

"Pues, si! We have black beans from time to time, and eggs 
when my Aunt Delfina goes to her village, which is Saint Pedro of 
the Pines, to fetch them. And meat on Sundays. But it's never very 
good meat. Just imagine, senora, we pay the butcher thirty centavos 
for a piece of meat, and it's pure nerves. My father says it's a shame. 
And we have coffee, too, but my father says it is bad for one. Is it 
so, senora?" 

"Oh, yes, coffee is bad." 

"My aunt, the older one, cannot sleep when she drinks coffee. 
But then she is very sick, and the pains keep her awake, too." 

I asked what the sickness was, and Ofelia shrugged and said, 
"Quien sabe? . . . who knows?" Spoken like a Mexican, who never 
says 'I don't know,' with its ring of personal responsibility. But he 
says 'who knows,' and he says it with a great weariness, as if the 
thing in question were utterly unknowable, or as if it would be asking 
too much of him to find out. 



I FEEL LIKE AN AVIATOR 

SO Ofelia became my maid. Dear Ofelia ! How ardently you 
craved the martyr's crown, and begged to be set sweeping and 
scouring and scrubbing on your knees. And how busy I was, 
keeping you busy, lest you suffer a moment's idleness and so fall from 
grace. I wanted to dismiss you a hundred times in those early days, 
but I couldn't. Because it would have been an expulsion from 
paradise for you, because your new maidhood was seventh heaven 
and a crown of glory to you. 

And how patiently in those early days you listened to my wisdom, 
the well-fed wisdom of my race, of which I delivered myself while 



I FEEL LIKE AN AVIATOR 19 

we sat eating the raw carrot — telling you of the wonderful vitamin 
and other magical entities/ You listened patiently but without belief; 
and yet you grew bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked, and different from 
your little sisters, who were waxen and pale as the very tortillas of 
their diet. "We shall turn into horses," I observed once, as we sat 
munching our raw carrots. "Or into burros," you said, and then you 
turned serious. "Yes, sefiora, there are people who remain burros 
all their lives. Those who have never been baptized in the Holy 
Church. All their lives they never have the wisdom of human beings." 
You were old, Ofelia, with the ancient wisdom of the Church; and 
old with the ageless dignity of the rebozo that framed your face. And 
only when you looked longingly at the ugly little celluloid dolls in the 
market did I remember your scarce ten years. Mornings, when I 
drew the curtains aside and looked down on the lot, I saw you standing 
at the door of the hut and braiding your hair. Already you had 
been to church. You had risen at five, weary and dirty from unrestful 
slumber on a straw mat, and unwashed but decently sheathed in your 
rebozo, you had walked many blocks to hear a Mass in the great 
golden church on the Reforma. 

And now, your peace made with God, you were preparing for the 
secular duties of the day. You braided your hair without a mirror. 
It was long chestnut hair, which the Mexicans call blonde, as they 
call any hair blonde which is not of an Indian blackness. No doubt 
the Scotch ancestor who gave you your name also gave you your 
chestnut hair. But your skin was for Mexico — dark, dark. When, 
obeying my orders, you scrubbed your face, you looked at yourself 
in the mirror and said despairingly, "But I am dark, dark, just the 
same, sefiora." And you hated your dark skin, because everyone 
knows that true beauty is white as the driven snow. And after you 
had braided your hair you went into the hut and came out wearing 
your black rebozo — the coarse cotton one, for the silk one was only 
for church — and with a basket on your arm and a peso in your hand, 
the single peso that must buy the day's food, you went to market for 
the pound of dough and for my paper. You did not understand why 
I must have another paper everyday. "Haven't you yesterday's?" 
you asked. And then I explained that the news is created fresh every 
day; and after that, with lofty understanding, you asked each morning 
as you gave me the paper: "And what is the news to-day?" 

"Well, Mexico is going to elect a President." Or, "The war in 
Europe continues." You did not know that Mexico had a President, 
or that there was a place called Europe. These were faraway things 
of no importance. But on the other hand, all the saints were near, 
and you knew the days of each and how one must honour them; and 
you knew what is mortal sin and what is forgivable. And you knew 
how to bargain in the market-place, and how to pound chile and make 
tortillas — things adequate for your world. 



20 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

And you knew also how to behave in difficult circumstances. For 
I believe it is a difficult circumstance to sit down at table with one 
of a strange race, to eat strange foods. That first time we sat down at 
table together — you did not touch the food, and I wondered why 
you sat so quietly without eating. And then you said, with great 
dignity and with that Mexican way of half-statement: "I, sefiora, as 
I do not eat at table. . . ." 

"But eat any way you like," I said. And you fell to, tearing the 
meat with your hands. But you did that also with reserve and a certain 
dignity. 

And you knew the gracious courtesy, the wonderful politeness of 
your people. "Well, sefiora, I am going," you said when the day's 
work was over. But you lingered. "With your permission, sefiora." 

"Well, sefiora, until to-morrow," and now you were at the door, 
where you waited a decent moment. "Well, sefiora, until we meet 
again. May it go well with you." And then the door closed softly, 
and your "Adois, sefiora," floated back to me. And thus, at the end 
of each day you left me, for leave-taking is a delicate matter, and 
one must never go abruptly. 

Dear Ofelia! You kept me so busy that my Otomis languished 
without their I.Q/s. And I had to work far into the night, and I was 
tired with the altitude and dozed over the papers. And so I would 
put them away with nothing done, and go to bed, and sleep was 
only a small moment before the sun sprang up from the mountains, 
and I heard the women making tortillas — the steady slap-slap as they 
tossed the dough between their palms. 

It is the sound of Mexico, as the blue of the sky is its colour. 
And the cold of the mountain night is still in the air when it begins. 
I would rise and draw the curtains, and see the sun low and clear on 
the level white buildings. From the huts came a Jaaze of smoke and 
the morning noises — chopping of wood, water splashing, and the pigs 
squealing; and Ofelia's little sister singing shrilly over and over, "To 
heaven, to heaven let me go, to receive the blessed crown, the blessed 
crown." And through it all the insistent slap-slap of tortilla-making, 
a rhythmic sound like part of a ceremonial, and one seems to hear 
far off the accompanying beat of feet in some primitive dance. 

I could see the women working in the smoky huts where the night 
still lingered, their hands twinkling in the obscure light, their faces 
bronze and shadowy as if emerging from a dark canvas. Outside 
the men were washing, dousing their heads in the dirty water in the 
barrels; and then, drying their faces, they went into the huts to eat. 
They squatted on the dirt floor, and took many tortillas at a time, and 
folded them and downed them with black coffee. All the men of the 
huts worked on the houses that were being built on the block; and 
after breakfast they strolled over to the foreman's shack, a leisurely 



I FEEL LIKE AN AVIATOR 21 

stroll with hands in pocket and much jesting. "Ay, how lonely I 
was last night!" It was the sung-out complaint of one of them — no 
doubt a bachelor; and every morning the men laughed at it, standing 
in front of the foreman's shack, and singing back retorts that increased 
the laughter. For singing is the word for Mexican speech. It is most 
noticeable in the working people, when they call to each other, talk 
loudly or jest. Then something happens to their speech — a lilt at the 
end of each phrase, a musical cadence always the same, with the 
last note fading away sweetly resonant. I used to think there was 
an opera company under my windows, for it was not speech that I 
heard, but a recitative always straining to break into song. 

The roll-call was always a long and elaborate business, and I am 
sure that the first step in bringing the Mexicans up to our northern 
standards of efficiency must be to shorten their names. "Senor Ilde- 
fonso Sanchez Morales." Senor Jose Herrera Rodriguez." The 
foreman intoned each name with long-drawn sonority, and each man 
answered, "Presente, maestro." Then the men who had come from 
other parts of the city went into the shack and hung up the woven 
bags in which they carried tortillas. But the foreman more often 
than not stands frowning at his list. "Juan! Juan!" he calls into the 
shack. "Are you drunk again?" Everyone looks toward the shack 
and Juan comes out, and he is drunk again. And grinning happily 
and waving his arms as if he were flying. No doubt he had been in 
the cantina a few blocks away, which bears the name: T Feel Like 
an Aviator*. 

Ofelia calls the men who work on the buildings 'los peones', the 
peons. This used to be the term for the serfs on the large estates 
before the Revolution. But now, either with land of his own or the 
right to acquire it, the rural labourer of Mexico is called a campesino 
— a peasant or farmer. Yet the word peon still persists, both for the 
rural labourer and the hired hand of the city. Nearly all the men 
who work on the buildings come from the provinces. They are not 
men of the city, not skilled builders. They have only recently been 
on the land, and the planting of a field of corn is more familiar to 
them than the processes of brick and mortar and the plumb-line. 
Perhaps that is why the hammering on the buildings sounds much 
busier than it really is; for the men work at their own rhythm, very 
relaxed and slow about whatever they are doing. And if a pedlar 
passes they all stop work, looking on while one of their number drives 
a bargain, at great length and with sallies of wit. 

There are always pedlars coming to the street. There is the old 
man who trots along under a perilous tower of painted straw chairs. 
He has to trot very fast to keep them from falling. And the Indians 
come with flowers from Xochimilco, and with berries and herbs. 
And a man and a woman come driving a small herd of goats before 
them. They are very young goats, uncertain on their legs, and they 



22 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

stop stupidly before no obstacle at all. Then the man and the woman 
scold them in an Indian language, which is probably Aztec. They 
are both very small, and ragged and barefoot, yet somehow proud and 
indomitable in their rags. The man's hair is a matted black mass 
under his sombrero, but the woman's two braids lie like carved wood 
against the high cheekbones. And there is a woman who comes selling 
live chickens, their dangling heads showing more life than the baby 
she carries on her back, half suffocated in her rebozo. And there is 
a man who comes flailing a flock of turkeys, that invade the street 
like mummers with their cries and strut and colour. And work must 
stop and everyone must watch while one of the peons buys something, 
for a good bargain is a public concern. And why should there be 
haste to make a building that will be only two stories high ? Of course, 
building a skyscraper is different. 

But the women really worked. They washed clothes every day, 
though the only water they had was carried from the buildings in old 
petrol cans. I used to watch and marvel at the way they treasured 
every drop of water, at their intricate system of wringings and rinsings 
that turned the clothes out as spotless as if a whole ocean had cleansed 
them. Mexican women always wash clothes horizontally on a stone, 
working their arms back and forth, instead of up and down. Perhaps 
it comes from the practice of washing clothes on a river bank, or 
because they have grown so used to moving their arms that way from 
grinding corn on the metate. But in any case it is certainly contrary 
to gravity, and very hard work. And it would be a good thing if 
the feminists who agitate for communal mills to grind the corn would 
also ask the Government for hundreds and hundreds of washboards. 
Then, when the clothes had been hung on the fences to dry, the 
women aired the sarapes and the straw sleeping-mats. And then all 
the earthenware pots were scoured with great wads of coarse hay, 
rinsed and turned upside down to dry. In the sun their burned bottoms 
gleamed like ebony. 

Ofelia and I worked also — the morning warfare against the flea. 
For it is ironical that in the high Valley of Mexico, where the moun- 
tain forms bespeak cosmic geologic upheavals, the greatest menace to 
man is the tiny flea. Let every resident of Mexico City put pesos for 
'fleet' on his budget. Fleet (the American Flit) is the name that 
Mexicans have adopted for any insecticide. You may buy a Mexican 
brand of fleet, but my grocer did not advise it. "Yes, senorita," he 
said, "I recommend the American fleet, even though it be dearer. 
The American product truly kills. The Mexican merely stuns the 
animal." And he gave a fine imitation of a stunned flea. Ofelia 
loved spraying fleet. The smell of it enchanted her, and she would 
go around inhaling it as though it were perfume. 

Ofelia could not tell time, but she went by the sound of the 
hammering. When it ceased altogether, she would announce: "Las 



I FEEL LIKE AN AVIATOR 23 

dos, senora. Two o'clock" — very proudly, as though she had looked 
at the clock. Then the peons invaded Manolo's store, calling loudly 
for beer and soda pop — the busiest hour for Manolo, who never took 
a siesta. The men who did not live on the lot ate in the scant shade 
of the buildings ; but the others ate in the huts — tortillas not so fresh 
as in the morning, and perhaps a paste of black beans fried in lard. 
I would hear Mrs. Escoto calling Ofelia's little sisters for this, their 
last meal of the day. At night there would be no supper call to take 
them from their playing. Yet they would play in the darkening air 
with tireless energy, and with no knowledge that they were hungry. 
Only they were thin and bony, and waxen as the image of the Virgin 
that stood on a packing-case in the hut. 

Ofelia called them her little pigs. "Pues, I am not hungry any 
more," she would say, laying down the knife and fork which she now 
used with some facility. We would agree that it was a sad waste of 
food to throw away what was left on her plate, and, since she had 
been talking about her tierra and the ranch where they used to live, 
she would suggest casually: "I could feed it to my little pigs." Which 
continued the talk and allowed her to carry off the food without 
embarrassment. 'Tierra 5 literally means earth, and thus the Mexican 
designates the region from which he comes, the place of his birth and 
childhood. Ofelia loved to talk about her tierra, like all good Mexicans, 
though she never seemed sure whether they had owned their ranch 
or whether it had been part of a great estate. But she said there were 
abundant fruits there, wood to be given away, oranges ripening faster 
than they could be picked, and eggs at two centavos in near-by Atoto- 
nilco. Yet they left their tierra and came to the city. 

"But why?" I asked. 

"Well, my father came first." 

"Yes, but why did he leave the ranch?" 

She considered. "Pues . . . you see, senora," and her words gath- 
ered aggrieved momentum, for she remembered now exactly how it 
had been. "They paid him only fifty centavos on the hacienda where 
he worked. Imagine that! Only fifty centavos for so much work 
every day, and for the family that we are, too. It was unjust, wasn't it ?" 

"Certainly it was unjust. But still you were better off there than 
here, weren't you? You had everything to eat, and a real house, 
and beds to sleep on. . . ." 

"Yes, senora, but we went barefoot all the time, and my father 
was angry that they paid him only fifty centavos." 

"And now?" I asked, looking down at her torn shoes. 

She sighed. "Now there is no money for shoes, either. Still, it is 
better that we came. My father earns more, oh, much more. It's 
only that we are so many — so many of us." 

She feels so sure that it was better, yet I cannot quite understand. 
Perhaps they did not own the land, after all, and the abundance 



24 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

was none of theirs, but only a charity from a kind hacendado. Or 
perhaps they did own the land, only that it gave them a surfeit of 
fruits where there was no one to buy, and what good is abundance if 
one cannot see a silver peso from one year's end to the next? Or 
perhaps it was simply as she said: "My father got angry that they 
paid him only fifty centavos." A man may well get angry at that 
and feel himself worth more, and leave everything he has to prove it. 

"Still," I reasoned, "why didn't your father, when he found work 
here, send money back to the ranch ? Why did all of you come to 
the city?" 

"My father wrote us one day to come, and we came," she said, 
with the air of one who gives more than adequate reason. And then 
with even more conviction: "Nor did we wish him to be alone here 
in the city." 

I had to let it go at that, though I was still troubled; for it seemed to 
me that they had made only an illusory change. They were still barefoot 
and poor as they had been before, and now they were starving, too. 

"And doesn't your father ever think of going back?" 

"Well, no" — she considered. "My mother talks of it often, but 
without much purpose. And the city is better, senora. Just imagine, 
in Atotonilco the streets are so narrow that an automobile could not 
pass through them, that is, if ever one came." 

"Just imagine." 

"And besides, my brother Daniel is coming now. He stayed behind 
so as not to forsake his sweetheart. But now they are going to get 
married and they are coming here for the nuptials. And Daniel will 
work, and we will have more money." 

'And more mouths to feed,' I said to myself, thinking how little 
simple mathematics counted with them. "And will Daniel and his 
sweetheart sleep in the hut?" 

"Pues, sf. My father wishes it." 

"And won't you be rather crowded?" 

She did not think so. "What does it matter," she sighed, "while 
we sleep?" 



MEET ME AT THE LITTLE ANGEL 

1 tried to persuade Ofelia sometimes that there was no work to be 
done, and that she might just as well go out and play. But she 
received the idea as though it was the whispering of the Devil. 
So to escape from her fury of cleaning I would go to the Reforma, 




diiiiimltvVlh 






wpsgass^ 




26 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

with instructions for her to find me, when she had finished, at the 
third statue down from the little angel. 

In Mexico you always give directions by the statues. You say to 
your driver, "Let me off at the green Indians"; or, "Let me off at 
the lions" ; or, "Let me off at the little horse." (This is a big equestrian 
statue of Charles IV. Mexico does not like to remember the Spanish 
kings, but the little horse is so good that it has been kept 'only as a 
work of art', as one reads on the base.) The city abounds in statues, 
and you may be sure that the good ones date from the colonial period, 
and that the bad ones are from the time of Porfirio Diaz, when all 
the sweet kindly impulses that did not find expression in government 
found their expression in statuary. 

I felt it was my civic duty to look at all the statues on the Re forma 
and find out who they were. So one day I started my inspection, 
but gave it up to watch a charro on horseback courting a nursemaid. 
She walked alongside the horse, wheeling the baby carriage, while 
he held the baby on his arm, very proud and paternal, and the horse 
stepped carefully with a high, gentle prance. And it was lovely to 
watch them moving under the trees, in the shade and in the sun that 
gleamed on his wide sombrero. In Europe there may be more impres- 
sive boulevards than the Reforma, but none with its charm of in- 
formality. You sit in the shade and watch the charros at their courting, 
and the burros come ambling over the lawns and crop the grass around 
the statues, and a cargador passes with a huge easy-chair or bed-spring 
that some sefiora has ordered in the market, and the campesinos come 
in from the country! — whole committees of them in to see so-and-so 
about their lands and water. It is a marvellous pageant, relaxing to 
the spirit; and especially so for Americans, who come from a country 
where there is nothing drearier than sitting on a park bench. 

And the same informality holds for all the city. Juan de Letran 
is a wide avenue, pride of the Chamber of Commerce, but the pedlars 
have taken possession of it and one can buy anything there from a 
fountain-pen to a coyote. And on Bolivar, which is a busy cross-street, 
the Indians sit on the kerb knitting socks, and the acrobats perform 
right in the midst of the traffic. But the pitchmen favour the streets 
around the Plaza. They have megaphones and they collect a crowd 
with the loud announcement: "Now begins the propaganda." (It is 
usually about Palmolive soap.) Even government buildings have no 
starched front. The National Palace corresponds to our White House, 
and you may catch a glimpse of el Presidente there. But the campesinos 
squat in front of it and heat their tortillas on little carbon stoves, and 
anyone may enter, though two soldiers guard the gates with gleaming 
bare bayonets. 

Naturally, the Chamber of Commerce is very much against all 
this, and the papers are filled with their impassioned appeals. 'How 
long, how long,' they cry in effect, 'will our fair city remain a village 



MEET ME AT THE LITTLE ANGEL 27 

and a market-place?' They want to do away with the pedlars, the 
beggars, and the strolling performers — in short, with all the gaiety 
and sadness of the streets. And instead they want order, order and 
cleanliness and quiet to impress the visiting Americans. There was 
a great campaign for cleanliness, but it seems to have miscarried like 
so many things in Mexico, and the newspaper bore the sad notice : 
'The city celebrates Cleanliness Week and the streets remain dirtier 
than ever.' There was another campaign against noise on which one 
paper made the sorrowful comment: 'The campaign against noise 
steals in quietly.' The future, of course, is with the Chamber of Com- 
merce, but that future is a long way off, and the trouble is deeper 
than they realize. 

Because Mexico City is not made of one piece like our own cities. 
An American city may be an ugly hodge-podge. It may have its 
slums close to rich sections, and its unemployed idle in the shade of 
busy factories. But all its contradictions are part of one age, part of 
its industrial growth. But Mexico City is different. For all the shining 
new cars that rush so wildly through the streets, and the modern 
hotels proudly advertising 'Steam Heat', and the skyscrapers built on 
special foundations on the swampy ground, the modernism of the city 
is only the thinnest veneer over all its past. It is still a village, part of 
the primitive countryside around it and the primitive Indian life. It 
is still the colonial city of the Spaniards, and the romantic nineteenth- 
century city of Porfirio Diaz; it is only superficially of this century 
and the things of this century. It is like a fresco in which there is no 
perspective to make things recede in time and space. Everything is 
of the present, jumbled together. One remembers the words of Bernal 
Diaz del Castillo, who was one of the soldiers who followed Cortes, 
and who in his old age sat down to write 'the true history of the con- 
quest', very indignant over the lies that had been told about it. 'And 
so I say and affirm that everything written in this book is very true, 
and that as an eye-witness I found myself in all the battles and en- 
counters of war; and they are not old tales which I tell, nor stories 
about the Romans of seven hundred years ago. For in a manner of 
speaking all that I tell happened only yesterday.' He wrote that four 
centuries ago, and one still feels that all that has happened in Mexico 
was only yesterday. 

I think the markets have not changed much. When the Spaniards 
had come to the city, by perilous marches over the mountains from the 
sea coast, and after they had met Montezuma with great ceremony 
and received lodgings in the palace, they sallied forth like good tourists 
to see the market. And it must have been very much like those that 
tourists see to-day. 

'And when we had come to the Grand Plaza, as we had never 
beheld such a thing, we were astonished at the multitude of people 
and the abundance of merchandise, and the order and arrangement 



28 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

that there was in everything. And I will mention first the vendors 
of gold and silver and precious stones, and feathers and robes and 
embroidered things.* Then there were other vendors who sold cloth 
and ropes of hennequen, and sandals, which are the shoes that they 
wear, and everything was in one part of the Plaza in its appropriate 
place. Let us go and talk of those who sold beans and herbs and 
other vegetables. Let us go to those who sold chickens and rabbits and 
hares and other things of the sort. Let us speak of those who sold pottery 
made in a thousand different ways from big basins to little pitchers, 
which were by themselves apart, and also of those who sold honey and 
sweetmeats, and wood and firewood and resinous pine strips.' 

The list gets so long that he adds rather testily: 'What more do 
you want me to say V Naturally, he could not mention the ugly litho- 
graph calendars (made in Japan) which are now sold in the markets, 
and which Mexicans buy for their gorgeous colour, though they may 
be unable to read the days of the month; or the glittering pins with 
false stones (made in the United States), which Mexicans prefer to 
their own silver-work. The resinous pine strips that he mentions are 
still used for a quick fuel ; and because they are so much used, together 
with charcoal, the land around Mexico City has been denuded of 
its forests. But now the Government is talking of using its newly 
recovered oil for making gas, which is still a luxury in Mexico. And 
the little pitchers that were by themselves apart, are still the chief 
kitchenware. They are made of mud and sell for a centavo. One 
need stand on the streets only three minutes to see a cargador pass 
with a huge pile of them on his back. 

But the Spaniards seem to have suffered the usual tourist diffi- 
culties, for, as Bernal Diaz says, 'the Plaza was so big and full of 
people it was impossible to see everything in one day.' And so they 
left the market and went to see the great temple, ascending the hundred 
and fourteen steps with the aid of two priests, whom Montezuma sent 
to help them so that they should not get tired. 

'And as we climbed to the top of the grand temple, we came to 
a platform covered with stones, where they placed the sad Indians 
for sacrifice. And there was a dragon-like figure and other evil figures, 
and much blood that had been spilt that day. And as we reached it 
the great Montezuma came out from the place where he had been 
praying, where his accursed idols were, and this was high up on the 
temple. And with the great respect that he showed to Cortes and to 
all of us, he said: "Tired you must be, Sefior Malinche, from your 
great climb." And Cortes told him through our interpreters that 
neither he nor any of us ever tired in anything.' (An ideal quality 
for tourists.) 

Then Montezuma took Cortes by the hand and told him to look 

* All these things, however, have since moved into the tourist stores, where they command 
a better price. 



MEET ME AT THE LITTLE ANGEL 29 

at the great city and all its environs, and it was very easy to see every- 
thing 'because that accursed temple lorded it over everything.' And 
they saw the three great highways leading into the city, and all the 
canals and the great lake of Texcoco crowded with canoes coming 
and going. The highways are still the same, but few of the canals 
are left now, and those near the city are muddied with pestilential 
drainage waters. And the great lake of Texcoco is dry, a tiny Sahara 
from which dense yellow clouds of dust rise in the rainy season to 
envelop the city. And all the glory of Tenochtitlan, the city that Cortes 
gazed on from the temple, is gone, too. It withstood the siege of the 
Spaniards and their Indian allies for sixty-five days — a siege by land 
and water, for Cortes ordered ships built and launched them on the 
lake, and from them discharged the big guns on the city. And whatever 
the fighting did not destroy, the Spaniards destroyed when they entered 
the city again. But at first they could not stay there because of the 
mountains of corpses and the stench from them. They withdrew to 
near-by Coyoacan, place of the coyote. 

The great Indian city is gone, but the sad Indians remain. One 
is curious to know whether Bernal Diaz found all the Indians sad, or 
only those who were about to be sacrificed, in which case it is very 
understandable. But it is certain that the Indians of to-day are sad. 
It may be racial, or it may be a sadness that comes from the conditions 
of their life. In the four centuries following the conquest nothing was 
added to the life of the Indians, everything was taken away. The 
Indians lived, and still live, under the most primitive conditions — a 
degraded form of the primitive because it is not a cultural stage, but 
a total deprivation of all that human beings should have. Only since 
the Revolution have the Indians been counted as part of the popula- 
tion of Mexico, and they are, whether pure-blooded or mixed, a good 
three-fifths of it. But the work of the Revolution can better their 
lives only slowly, but that is its chief task, and it is the future of Mexico. 
The sad Indians had the first word, and they will probably have 
the last. 

And they come to the city as though it were only a big village, 
and they never take the streets seriously, but sit down to rest or eat 
their tortillas in front of the modern buildings. Groups of campesinos 
come in their white smocks and white trousers, sandalled or barefoot, 
with leather bags slung over their shoulders, on pilgrimage to the 
Virgin of Guadalupe or to see about their lands. And they gape up 
at the big buildings, or look into the store windows, where there are 
displays of modern farm machinery, or stand listening to a gramo- 
phone bawling American jazz. I think it is this constant reminder of 
the primitive in a modern setting that gives Mexico its quality of 
excitement. And it makes for comedy, too. 

I remember one day in the Alameda. It is a park in the centre 
of town, bosky and well-treed like all the parks of the city, but clut- 






30 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

tered with bad statues. At the end near the Palace of Fine Arts, the 
Inquisition used to burn its victims. Later it became a fashionable 
promenade. Now it is a pleasant place to read the paper, to have 
your shoes shined, to pass the siesta hours while you wait for the 
city to come to life again. I was reading the paper near one of the 
statues — a whipped-cream female nude — when the sound of sup- 
pressed laughter made me look up. A man and a woman, barefoot 
and very ragged (they may have been Otomis to judge by their 
speech), were looking at the statue, nudging each other, laughing with 
their hands to their mouths, finding it indescribably funny. It was 
the most forthright piece of art criticism I have ever seen, and I 
enjoyed that statue with them, as I have enjoyed few works of art. 
Later a campesino came to have his picture taken. There are photo- 
graphers in the Alameda who give you a donkey to sit on, or a sarape 
to drape over your shoulder, or a big oleograph of the Cathedral of 
Guadalupe for a background. This photographer happened to have 
a huge bull fiddle, and the campesino posed himself with it, and every- 
one stopped to watch in utter solemnity. Only the gringa laughed 
and went off in disgrace, but with a feeling that the day had been 
well spent. 

That was the day I bought a parrot for Ofelia. I thought she 
might keep it in the hut, and it would distract her from the house- 
cleaning, and I would have more time alone. 

"He is well behaved, senora," the old man said when he sold it 
to me. "He is not vulgar. He will never embarrass you." The parrot 
eyed me slyly and malevolently, like a wrongdoer who hears his 
lawyer praising him in court. "He is a Christian, senora. His name 
is Leopoldo, and he has very good antecedents.'' 

I took the Christian Leopoldo home, and Ofelia took him to her 
house, and for a time it was very easy to persuade her not to work, 
on the grounds that Leopoldo needed her care. He did behave very 
well at the beginning, but it turned out that he was only biding his 
time. Ofelia came up one day very alarmed. 

"Senora, I believe we will have to get rid of the parrot. Forgive 
us, senora, but we cannot keep him, not another day, my father says." 

"But why, Ofelia?" 

"Pues, as we are so many in the hut ..." 

"But you could put him outside." 

She broke down completely. "Ay, senora, the things he said! 
They were not to be listened to by decent people. If you had heard 
him, senora!" 

I was really sorry that Leopoldo was not the Christian we had 
thought him to be, for it was a time of great peace for me. But there 
was nothing to be done about it, and Ofelia sold him to the man who 
came to grind the knives, and recommended him as a model of 
behaviour. 



32 THE DAYS OF OFEL1A 



5 



TO EAT WITH CONFIDENCE 

""V 1 Tell, he is coming," Ofelia said one day. 

Vy "who?" 

W W "Why, Daniel." She had a way of continuing conversa- 
tions that had long since passed from my memory. "Already he has 
reached Guadalajara, where he ordered a letter sent to us. He came 
there from my pueblo on a burro, for the cheapness of it, with his 
sweetheart and a basket of chicks which we will raise for their eggs. 
Now, with the train from Guadalajara he will be here in no time." 

She polished the knife she was drying, and sighed: "The question 
of a wedding dress preoccupies me." 

But I did not answer at once, thinking of Daniel and his sweet- 
heart. I saw them riding the burro, the girl in back of Daniel with 
her arms around his waist, and Daniel very busy hitting the burro 
with his legs. And then they were in Guadalajara, where they stood 
a long time in admiration of the Cathedral, and then they sought out 
a scribe in the market-place to write the letter. Daniel dictated it 
and watched the mysterious words forming; but the girl was bored 
and lifted the lid of the basket and looked at the chicks. 

"Do you think you would like a dress of pink silk?" I asked Ofelia. 

"I am very fond of pink silk," she said, with just the right toucn 
of reserve. But then she added firmly: "It is not urgent, however. 
My father says Daniel must find work before he may marry. Perhaps 
the boss will make him a watchman of the new building." 

The scribe must have delayed sending the letter; for Daniel came 
the next morning, right on the heels of it, so to speak. I saw him 
outside the hut. His sweetheart was washing his hair, and all the 
Escotos were standing around in a state of great hilarity. He had 
brought many foods with him from Atotonilco, and Ofelia said I was 
to come in the evening, first to acquaint myself with these foods, and 
then to meet Daniel. So all day I avoided passing the hut, so that 
my presentation to Daniel might be formal as they wished it to be; 
and I waited until well after dark before knocking at the door. Mexi- 
cans do not rush the day off unceremoniously as we do. It is still 
'Good afternoon' at eight o'clock, or even nine o'clock — as long, in 
fact, as there is the faintest glimmer of light in the sky. 

Mrs. Escoto introduced me simply as 'the sefiora', and Daniel and 
his girl smiled politely and made room for me on the bed. Daniel 
was built small and slender as a jockey. He looked like all the Escoto 
children — green eyes and sandy hair, a giiero or blond. But he had 
buck teeth, and my first thought was that he did not look as bright as 



TO EAT WITH CONFIDENCE 33 

the others. His sweetheart was a strapping girl, dark and boyish, with 
high cheekbones and a fine smile. I kept looking and looking at her, 
to conclude in the end that she was thoroughly fascinating. 

"Ay, sefiora," Mrs. Escoto said, and blew away the formalities 
with her sigh. "Ofelia bothered me so all afternoon! 'That you do 
not make tortillas, for the sefiora does not eat them.' 'That you do 
not make frijoles, for the sefiora does not like them.' Following me 
around and talking and talking until I was nearly crazy, and could 
not concentrate properly on the cooking. So that if the dishes should 
not please you . . ." 

"Vaya!" I said, "how will they not please me, when I have long 
awaited this opportunity to savour the true Mexican cooking." 

"Ah, really, sefiora? Then how relieved I am. You are not 
afraid to eat with us ? Then how relieved I am." She smiled broadly 
and sat down, taking her place with the women against the wall. 
They sat on boxes in a row, crouching, holding the long ends of their 
rebozos between their arms — the old grandmother, who kept looking 
from one to another with her bright unseeing bird-like eyes, and Mrs, 
Escoto and the two aunts. The younger aunt, she whose husband had 
left her, was very pretty. She sat modestly and with downcast eyes. 
But the older one, who had the sickness of which they knew so little, 
not even the name, was sharp-featured and bright-eyed with suffer- 
ing. It was she who always greeted me with 'How did the dawn 
find you?' — the melancholy greeting of an invalid, for whom each 
dswn must be a stock-taking of pains. There was only candlelight in 
trie room, and the women sitting in shadow and sheathed in their 
long rebozos looked like sculpture, like the repeated figures on a frieze. 

Daniel had been giving them the news of their tierra when I came 
in, and now, with many apologies to me, he continued — telling them 
of deaths and marriages, of births and sicknesses, of so-and-so who had 
grown paralysed, of another who had committed a murder and fled 
to the mountains. And they listened gravely and without comment, 
as people do who receive news rarely, and who know that from the 
things that happen in life there is no appeal. The room was crowded, 
for now with Daniel and his girl there were fourteen to live in the hut; 
and as I listened I wondered about their lives, about their intimacies 
and sexuality. But the real wonder was how, from this herd-like, 
comfortless, and starving life of theirs, came such dignity, such 
graciousness and chaste reserve. 

Daniel spoke for a long time, but at last silence fell on his narra- 
tive, and Mrs. Escoto rose, sighing over all she had heard, and went 
into the other room where the foods were cooking on an open fire. 
She came back bearing a packing-case which she set before me, and 
over it she laid a white cloth. "Then you are really not afraid to 
eat with us?" she asked again, and again I assured her that I 
was not. 



34 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

Scnor Escoto encouraged me. "This of eating strange foods," he 
mused, "it is something one must venture boldly and with confidence." 
He stood leaning against the door, looking out on the street and the 
quiet blue night, as if he had some need to show he was not quite 
part of this womanish gathering. 

"As we should do, senora," said the younger aunt, "if ever it 
should be our good fortune to visit over there in your country." She 
offered cigarettes, the small thin ones that are bought at five for a 
centavo, and then the candle was passed around to light them. But 
Seiior Escoto waved it away and used a gold cigarette ligher for his. 
Only he seemed to want to hide it, and he put it away quickly. "And 
is the tortilla consumed much over there, senora?" 

"Little. It is a delicacy over there." 

"Really? Then what do they eat over there?" The tone of her 
voice clearly implied that obviously, in that case, we do not eat at all. 

Mrs. Escoto came in with the first of the dishes, Ofelia and her 
little sisters following in procession. There was corn baked on the 
cob, a great delicacy in Mexico, where most of the corn is used for 
making tortillas; and there were tortillas — the thin flabby ones which 
must be eaten hot or they taste like seaweed, and the thick crisp ones 
mixed with flour, which are much more like our idea of a biscuit. 
And there was a soup of corn, with meat and sharp green chiles; 
and atole, mentioned by the chroniclers as the beverage of Monte- 
zuma, lord of the Aztecs. It is a gruel of corn and chocolate. They 
whirl a stick in it, much as though they were making fires, and the 
gruel gets frothy and foamy. And there was also purslane fried in 
lard and a dish of the spiny cactus leaves of the nopal. But these 
greens were only condiments for the dishes of corn which is con- 
sumed in so many ways in Mexico that the different forms of it seem 
like the varying manifestations of the corn goddess. 

Mrs. Escoto arrayed everything before me, and then she sat 
down well pleased. "Know, senora, that here is your home, and. here 
we are at your service. Whenever you have the whim to taste what 
is typically Mexican — something they have told you about or that 
you have tasted in the restaurants ..." 

"Vaya!" Senor Escoto took his glance from the street to rebuke 
her. "And if she prefers the restaurants ?" 

The smell of corn filled the room, and I was hungry and wondered 
when they would eat. But nobody moved to the table, and there was 
a silence, while Mrs. Escoto made a pleased purring sound in her throat, 
a sort of wordless speech binding us all together in comradely well- 
being. Smoke came in from the other room. "Ay, the calabash!" she 
cried, and jumped up and ran inside. Ofelia followed, and her voice 
drifted back in a whisper meant for secrecy, but loud enough to be 
heard. "But she eats with the knife and thefork y I tell you" 



TO EAT WITH CONFIDENCE 35 

"Pues, senora"— the young aunt cast her eyes down modestly — 
"that is something we" have never learned. The knife and the 
fork." 

"As it is not needed in our diet ..." said the older aunt, and I 
heard myself roundly denouncing the knife and the fork. It was 
merely the custom of my country, a custom for barbarous meat- 
eaters. "Ah, yes, the question of customs," Sefior Escoto mused 
wisely, and then Mrs. Escoto came back with the calabash and a 
small earthenware pitcher, which she thrust into Daniel's hands. 

"You will go for pulque." 

My heart sank, for I had heard the sturdiest travellers describe 
pulque with horror — the white yeasty-looking drink made from the 
juice of the maguey plant, into which all kinds of ordure is put to 
make it ferment more rapidly. It may be pure and palatable when 
drunk in the country on the hacienda where it is made. But pulque 
of the city that is sold for six centavos a pitcher in the paper-berib- 
boned pulquerias is not recommended for the palate or for the nostrils. 
The legend is that an Indian princess, Xochitl, discovered how to 
make pulque, and some authorities say that the Indians before the 
time of the conquest never took it to excess. But to-day, in a land where 
water is scarce and where the diet gives no sustenance, pulque is both 
water and nourishment, a giver of energy for a while and ultimately 
of death, for it is a perfect culture for many different kinds of disease- 
bearing bacteria. 

Daniel was already at the door when I protested. "So much 
trouble for him. Please do not bother. Really, I had not expected 
pulque, and I shall not be the least disappointed not to have it." 

"Pues . . ." Mrs. Escoto hesitated. "Know, senora, that we 
ourselves do not drink it, but it is very typical." 

"Yes, typical!" the young aunt said scornfully. "But it is the 
great vice of our Mexicans, and one is better off without it." 

"A vice, nothing less." Seilor Escoto spoke with unwonted energy. 
"Know that in our tierra it is not much consumed. We of Jalisco 
are not like those of the mesa here, drunk and besodden with pulque- 
drinking. I myself have never touched it, nor would I permit the 
drinking of it here in this house." 

I was not sure, but I thought he looked meaningly at Daniel, who 
stood at the door looking from one to another and grinning broadly, 
as if this discussion amused him inordinately. 

"Then that I do not violate the customs of this house," I said 
fervently, and Daniel sat down again, still very much amused. 

Serior Escoto bestirred himself in answer to signals from his wife. 
"Well, there is some tequila," he said, with a touch of reluctance, 
and produced a bottle from behind the packing-case that served as 
altar for the Virgin. "This is permitted, yes. We do not have it often, 
senora, but it is a gift from my compadre there in Guadalajara." 



36 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

"And do you know Guadalajara?" Daniel asked politely, while 
his father poured the tequila. 

"No, I do not And I am very much ashamed that I do not know 
Guadalajara." 

"Then you must make its acquaintance. It is a wonderful city," 
said Daniel, who had been there a few hours. 

"Guadalajara!" Mrs. Escoto looked at him scornfully, shifting her 
rebozo. "What would the senora find there to amuse her? The 
sefiora comes from New York. Now that, I believe, is a city." 

"Is it near the city of Michigan?" Daniel's sweetheart asked. 

"No, it is not near Michigan, which is not a city, either, but a 
State." 

"That is sad, then. Because the husband of a girl in our tierra 
went to the United States and got lost in Michigan. And she weeps, 
weeps, weeps for him all the time." 

"How silly," Ofelia said. "If he were my husband I should go to 
"Michigan and find him." 

"And you would lose yourself, too," her father chided her. He 
Hit another cigarette, furtively as before, with the gold cigarette 
■lighter. "Many of our Mexicans lose themselves in the United States. 
Your country has a great fascination for us, sefiora." 

,"Not more than Mexico for us, sefior," I countered politely. 
rc We come now by the thousands to enjoy the beauties of your country." 

"Yes, the boss was telling me the city is full of Americans. Mucha 
turista, mucha turista!" he said. For the Mexican, to describe the 
presence of large numbers of any plague like flies or tourists or insects, 
will say: much fly, much tourist, much insect. "The boss hopes 
they will come and live in the houses, which he is having built to the 
specifications of an American who claims that he knows what 
your countrymen like. True that they are houses pleasing to you 
Americans?" 

"True," I said, thinking of the bath-tub that drained the wrong 
way, the shower that hit the wall, and other details of the splendid 
but misguided plumbing which Mexicans install in their houses with 
great enthusiasm and a total lack of workability. 

"Yes, yes, much tourist," he nodded, drawing on his cigarette. 
"They travel all over the country." 

"Nor do they have to pay," said Mrs. Escoto, "which makes it 
exceedingly easy." 

"But certainly we must pay!" I exclaimed. 

"Ah — then you do not travel free? Then I do not understand it. 
How you can travel around so much if you must pay!" 

"It is because one dollar is worth many pesos." 

"I do not understand that, either." 

"Nor I," I said frankly, never having understood the mysteries 
.of foreign exchange. "But look you. If I have an American dollar, 



TO EAT WITH CONFIDENCE 37 

I can go to a money-changer on Isabela la Catolica and get five 
pesos for it." 

"That is very convenient." 

"I have found it so." 

She sighed. "If only we all had dollars, for then we could go 
back to our tierra. But look you, sefiora, it is a great outlay and there 
are many of us. It would be a fortune. So that it is likely we shall 
never see our tierra again, for lack of the money to go there." 

"Nor is there necessity," Senor Escoto told her brusquely. "We 
are well enough here. And now that Daniel has come ..." 

Daniel clasped his knees, leaned back and smiled while everyone 
looked at him. "But my fancy," he said with a worldly air, "is to 
travel. I would like to visit your tierra, sefiora. Already I know several 
English words, which an American taught me on the train." 

"Ay, Daniel, what a scholar you are!" his sweetheart teased. 

"His mouth was always too much open," Ofelia said. "Flies got 
in, and now, it seems, English words." 

"For shame, Ofelia, to talk so of your brother." Mrs. Escoto 
turned to me. "No, sefiora, Daniel is really bright. He always had a 
gift for learning. But this Ofelia here has a great deal of malice in 
her. She is very presuming and I cannot imagine what sort of a 
woman she will be. Already the men look at her. It is something in 
her blood, I believe. I do not know what she has in her blood, that 
already the men look at her, with her braids still down her back." 

Ofelia blushed, while her mother continued sternly: "And do you 
remember in the train from Guadalajara ? Far from putting yourself 
out to learn anything, you smiled at the trainman. He made a pet 
of her and bought her candy and tweaked her braids. Truly it was 
scandalous. So that I am afraid here in the city to let her walk far 
from the house. And the only way I know that she has gone to the 
doctrine on Tuesdays is by asking her what is new in the catechism. 
You see, sefiora, we in Mexico are somewhat wild. And it is nothing 
for a man to take a girl by her braids and drag her away and do 
her a grave injury." 

"Yes, we are savages," Senor Escoto said, rather satisfied. 

"And over there" — the young aunt looked down modestly— "it is 
very different, isn't it . . ." But Daniel spared me the problem of 
answering. 

"How I should like to visit over there! Tell me, sefiora, do they 
speak Spanish at all over there?" 

"That you do not speak stupidities!" his father eyed him sternly. 
"Clearly they do not speak Spanish over there, for look you, they 
come here and they cannot even speak it." 

"Yes, it is a barbarity, this speech of the tourists," Daniel agreed. 
"Already I have heard two of them asking the way to a certain street, 
and it was a strange way they spoke, very far from our Castilian. 



38 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

Almost they sounded like the little Indians who come trotting in from 
the mountains with their carbon and wood for sale. God knows what 
idiom these Indians speak, but we" — his glance swept everyone present, 
while- his gesture took in all those of his tierra — "we speak Spanish!" 

But his pride and scorn fell on a silence, for of a sudden we were 
all staring at the table. By now it was late enough even for Mexicans 
to consider it supper-time, and I felt very hungry. But the food 
remained untouched like a still-life on the table, though it was a 
banquet such as they had probably not tasted in years. 

Ofelia came timidly from her corner. "Well, it is as I thought," 
she said sadly. "She does not like our food." 

"Nonsense, child. I have not even tasted it." 

"Because you do not like it, sefiora. Obviously!" 

"No, I am waiting until everyone eats, nothing more." 

"Ah, she is waiting until everyone eats, nothing more," the young 
aunt echoed softly, explaining to everyone. 

"Pues . . ." Mrs. Escoto arose majestically, and her long-toothed 
smile was triumphant. "It has all been a misunderstanding. For just 
imagine, sefiora, here we have been sitting and thinking that you dis- 
dained our foods." 

"But on the contrary!" 

"Then eat, eat!" she said imperiously, and shoved the plates 
toward me. "Ourselves, we have eaten to satiety to-day. It is all 
for you." 

"Ah, then it is all too much." 

"Ah, then you really do not like it." 

"Obviously," the old aunt said accusingly, and everyone agreed: 
Obviously ! 

"No, no. Only I shall feel so greedy dining alone." 

"Would to Allah," Serlor Escoto concluded the argument fer- 
vently. "Would to Allah that you feel greedy! For then we shall 
no longer experience doubts." 

So I fell to, thinking that here was the ultimate refinement of 
courtesy — not to eat with one's guest, but to cause him to eat alone 
in solitary state. But like all refinements, there was cruelty in it. 
I felt like the trapped bird who is fed strange foods while his captors 
look on. And something of my terror must have shown in my face, 
for Mrs. Escoto said: "Eat, sefiora, eat with confidence." 

But while I ate with confidence there came a knock at the door. 
"Ave Maria," a voice said. 

And everyone in the room responded: "De gracia." 

It was the first of the guests come to see Daniel, and after that 
many more came. 



DENTI3TA 




ENTRADA 
A LAYUELTA 

AVMADEKO 



11 



HOTKAKS 



i^ 



Et mejoi 



^ N/INO \ 




4 o THE DAYS OF OFELIA 



6 



'ALLO GOOD-BYE 

Daniel wanted to continue the study of English that he had 
begun on the train, and so he would knock at my door, and 
when I opened he would stand there smiling and embarrassed, 
shifting his posture many times before he spoke. "Sefiora," he would 
ask finally, "could you give me some English words?" It was like 
a neighbour coming to borrow salt. 

On the train he had learned to say ' 'Alio, good-bye, 5 and 'Worldes 
Fair' ! (This last with a great deal of conviction.) So I gave him a 
few more such words each time, and he learned them diligently, and 
I felt that very soon the Escotos could put out a sign such as one sees 
on the tourist stores in the centre of town: English is spoken. 

English is spoken in Mexico City, to which there is no objection. 
But, in addition, Spanish is absorbing a flood of undigested English 
words, which may make for a very sad jargon of the two languages 
in the future. On the sports pages of the newspapers you read about 
'beisbol' and 'boxeo', 'el noqueout' and 'el upper-cut'. The society 
pages announce: 'Gran preview en un night club', and invite you to 
'bailar swing' ; and in the .news you read of a political 'mitin' that 
was addressed by 'un lider'. You may have your shoes cleaned by 
a 'chainero' (so called because he gives you a 'chain'), and you may 
stop at a 'Loncheria' and order 'hotkaks' and 'pig sandwichs'. 
The stores sell three-piece furniture as 'un set', and a funny picture 
is 'un derroche de laughs'. I felt that the coming of the New York 
Follies boded no good for Mexico, and my fears were confirmed 
when a huge sign appeared on the Palace of Fine Arts : las glamour 

GIRLS Y LAS LOVELIES DEBUTAN HOY. 

This influx of English words worries many Mexicans, especially 
those who have the dignity of their language at heart. Latin-Americans 
have an attitude toward their language which it is hard for us to 
understand. They are very proud of it, very jealous of it, as they are 
proud and jealous of all their culture, while we Americans are more 
concerned about our comfort and material well-being. It is an atti- 
tude that comes to them from the Spaniards, who alone among all 
the nations of Western Europe did not develop along material lines, 
but remained an other-worldly people, given to philosophy and 
introspection. The Spaniards have always been very emotional about 
their language. They have been too emotional about it, if you wish; 
but still they have cherished it in the way that other nations will 
cherish their road mileage or their favourable balance of trade. And 
the Latin- Americans have inherited this attitude, and with them it 



'ALLO GOOD-BYE 41 

has an additional emphasis. Now that the revolt against Spain is 
more than a century old, and all the rancours and animosities that 
went with it quite out of their systems, they have begun to look back 
to Spain again, and to re-evaluate their Spanish heritage. And in 
this process they find that the language is an affirming force. It binds 
them to all the traditions that they wish to conserve of the mother 
country, it is the vessel of transmission and therefore dear to them. 

So the professors are busy trying to keep their language Spanish, 
and to find equivalents for English words. But not always with com- 
plete success. Instead of 'el sandwich', for instance, the word 'empare- 
dado' has been adopted. This means 'something between walls 5 , and 
though it sounds more Spanish it seems less edible. Along with 'el 
sandwich' there is the problem of what to call a person from the 
United States. In justice we should not be called 'Americanos', for 
all the people of the Western world are Americans, and there is no 
reason why we should monopolize the term. To the nations south of 
us we are 'los Norte-Americanos', and that is what we are often called. 
But this, again, is unsatisfactory, because it does not distinguish us 
from the Canadians and the Esquimos. In strict logic, such a person 
should be called an 'Estadounidense'. But one much prefers the 
uncomplimentary 'gringo', or the universally used 'Yanqui'. 

One favours this effort to find Spanish equivalents for our words, 
but the future is problematical. The cultures of the United States and 
the Spanish-speaking world are at present at different levels. Neither 
Spain nor the countries of Latin-America are industrialized nations, 
and for that reason Spanish lacks many words for things, machines, 
processes, that already exist in English. Our exports and our general 
influence are bound to bring them these lacking words — and in our 
language. And this process will coincide with a period in which the 
Latin-American masses grow more literate, with more books, news- 
papers, and magazines in circulation, all of which will act as agents 
to spread our words. 

Or will they do just the opposite and educate our neighbours to 
more and better Spanish ? It is very dangerous to make prophecies, 
and perhaps one should say only that the fight between English and 
Spanish will be on in earnest, with forces aiding both languages. 
Thus far, it is certain, Spanish has shown itself very stubborn. In 
the four centuries during which it has lived in the new world in 
contact with many different Indian tongues, it has resisted change, 
remained essentially itself. Of course, Spanish was the superior lan- 
guage and belonged to the superior culture, and that may account 
for its staying intact. But how if our neighbours to the south feel that 
it is also superior to English, and the culture of things and machinery 
that English represents? They call the words that we have given to 
their language 'barbarismos' ; which reminds one uncomfortably that 
they sometimes call us, too, barbarians — the barbarians in the North. 



42 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

And Spanish has survived with a great deal of uniformity through- 
out the nations that speak it in this hemisphere. National differences 
of speech do exist, but no person from one Latin-American country 
has difficulty in understanding a person from another. And what is 
more surprising, in understanding a Spaniard from Europe. The 
language has changed, naturally, on both sides of the ocean since the 
time that Spanish was extended to the New World, but the changes 
on our side have closely paralleled those that have occurred in Spain, 
because they have been the natural changes within the laws of phil- 
ology. 

So we are told by the philologists, who happen to have very little 
influence on the human instinct for snobbery. Like the Englishman 
who comes to the United States, the Spaniard from the Peninsula 
often comes to Latin-America with the feeling that there they must 
speak a quite inferior brand of his language. If he is a Gastilian, he 
is especially proud of his theta, the lisping 'th' sound where most 
Latin-Americans use an V sound. The Spaniard from Europe is very 
apt to feel that the language in the New World has declined sadly since 
the time of the conquerors. But to take the conquerors as models of 
linguistic perfection is pure fantasy, on a par with some of our ideas 
about our first settlers. There were among the conquerors some of 
more or less fame who could not even read or write, and all the 
conquerors were rough-and-ready adventurers. And they had scant 
respect for the Indian names of places. Many of the Mexican place- 
names that sound to us so purely Indian are only what the Spaniards 
thought they heard the Indians say. They managed to get some 
very queer versions of the names they heard, in which, perhaps, 
they were not unlike the tourists of our day. 

I resisted all the efforts of my Spanish friends to make me talk 
with the theta, for I wanted my Spanish to have the stamp of the 
country where I had learned it. But I did not feel that I spoke like 
a real Mexican until I could use the diminutive with the recklessness 
with which the Mexicans use it. One feels sometimes that one is in 
a world of midgets, to hear a Mexican talk of 'his little mother', 'his 
little grandmother', 'his little friend'. Or that everything on the 
market has shrunk to miniature size: 'Buy, buy, sefiorita! A little 
purse — a little broom'. Or that everything is exquisitely dainty: 'I 

put on my little blouse and my little skirt, my little shoes ' The 

news vendor, giving you change, asks: 'Have you a little penny?' 
And the waitress brings you the little check and you leave her the 
little tip. And then there is 'ahorita', which means 'in a little right 
away', and which puts you off very gracefully. And there is 'tantito', 
over which I have brooded for hours. 'How can you eat tantito?' — 
'so much of a little bit' ? 

It is said that this prodigal use of the diminutive ending comes 
from a form in the Nahuatl language, which was spoken by the 



'A LLO GOOD-BYE 43 

Aztecs and is still spoken in Mexico to-day. But I think there is more 
in it than that. For so many centuries the Mexican peon lived in a 
state of serfdom, entirely dependent on the lord of the hacienda for 
everything he needed. And when he asked for anything it had to 
be done with servile humility; he could not ask but had to beg. What 
more natural than that he should minimize what he was asking for, 
as to-day the beggars ask for 'una socirrita, por dios!' — 'a little piece 
of charity' ? And I think it is also a form of delicacy in speech, part 
of that marvellous courtesy which one observes in all classes, and in 
the people of the streets more than in others. 

I wanted to acquire a reasonable amount of slang, too, but it 
hasn't much vogue in Mexico. Speech is very much of one piece 
among all classes, though naturally there are words that belong to 
various trades, not all respectable. But slang is not created with 
such speed and variety as among the Americans, probably because 
city life is not so developed. I remember a night at El Chino's when 
I boasted of the superior vividness of the American language, and the 
affronted Mexicans challenged me to prove it, and we began making 
lists on the paper napkins. I could muster more slang, but they won 
in poetic expressions, with some really splendid proverbs and com- 
parisons based on the age-old simplicities of country life. Nor does 
Spanish lend itself to slang. It is not fast enough. Take our retort, 
'Horse feathers!' In Spanish you would have to say, 'las plumas de 
un caballo' — 'the feathers of a horse' — which sounds like a mistake 
on the menu. One notes the difference at the movies, in the way 
English dialogue is translated into Spanish sub-titles. 'Skip it!' 
becomes 'let us leave that topic'. 'He's up against it', turns into 'he 
finds himself in difficulties'. And a beauty like, 'Listen, sister, dames 
like you can't afford to be too choosy', is just left severely alone. 

I went to the movies to learn the colloquial expressions, but it 
did not help much, and I found that when slang did appear I resented 
it because it did not seem to me to ring true. That was because, as 
the grammars recommend, I had begun to think in Spanish — which 
means to think in very dignified phrases. Soon I could think with as 
much dignity as Ofelia, and it no longer struck me as funny when she 
used an expression that English reserves for learned professors. I 
did not see her on the morning after Daniel's arrival, but she came up 
later full of apologies. 

"Ay, seiiora," she sighed, "forgive me, but I am so disoriented. 
All night we have been listening to that Daniel with his stories, and 
it has been so diverting ..." 



SI, NO HAY 45 



SI, NO HAY 

Daniel found work as a night watchman on one of the buildings, 
and in the early hours his sweetheart came and kept him 
company. Senor Escoto also stood guard at night, but nearer 
to the house ; and whenever I passed late I would see him standing in 
the shadows, immobile, holding his sarape across his face for fear of 
the night air. It needed the 'buenas noches' that we exchanged to 
assure me that it was he. For the Mexican changes in the dark, 
becomes part of the night and the shadows. I liked walking late on 
the deserted streets, when the white-walled buildings seemed still as 
ruins in the moonlight, and only the wandering watchman was 
abroad, playing musically on his whistle. Sometimes I saw him, a 
ghostly figure wrapped in his sarape as in a medieval cloak, haunting- 
the streets with silent footfall. His whistle must have warned thieves 
and wrongdoers of his whereabouts, and I imagine that they listened 
for the sound of it and then went quietly to where he was not. But 
probably it was not meant to frighten them, but only to assure the 
good citizens in their beds that all was well. The watchmen used to 
carry torches and call 'Ave Maria Purisima.' One cannot hear that 
call any more, but the torches can still be bought in the Thieves' 
Market. 

And walking through the streets at night I used to think of the 
city's legends, the weird and fearful legends that do not seem things 
of the past in the city's strange atmosphere. There was La Llorona, 
the weeping one, who wailed through the streets at night, punished 
because she had betrayed her people to the conquerors; and La 
Mulata, the witch who flew through prison bars to escape the torture 
of the Inquisition; and a host of others, demons and witches and 
ghosts and assassins. It is a city twice haunted, from the time when it 
was Tenochtitlan of the Aztecs, and from the time of the friars, who 
brought the Middle Ages to Mexico and all their demonology and 
superstition. 

But the legend I liked best concerns a nobleman whose name I 
have forgotten. The story is that he burst from his house one night 
and ran insanely through the streets, asking of all whom he met: 
"Do you know the day of your death?" And those who answered no, 
he killed, saying: "Unfortunate one, that you did not know the day 
of your death." And those who answered yes, he also killed, with a 
"Fortunate one, that you knew the day of your death." It was this 
nobleman with his poor sense of humour whom I should least have 
wanted to meet when I walked alone at night. How much pleasanter 



46 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

to meet Daniel and his girl, and to hear their friendly 'buenas noches' 
from the shadow of the building where he kept guard. 

Things were better now that Daniel had come. The chickens 
grew and soon Ofelia was selling their eggs. "You see," she said 
proudly, "now we have more money. My father says there will 
soon be enough to buy me shoes." I was not very enthusiastic about 
buying the eggs, for the chickens gorged on all the refuse on the lot. 
The lavatory for all the families was on the other side of the lot, 
against a blank wall. I bought the eggs and put them away and used 
the tiny brown ones that Manolo sold so expensively in the store. 
Yet this was pure self-deception, and soon I gave up worrying about 
the matter at all. The practical side of life in Mexico is difficult 
enough, and if one is to worry about all the precautions against 
disease there is little time left for anything else. Water must be 
boiled, milk must be boHed, and vegetables are a problem. The 
Indians who bring them in from the outlying districts dip them in 
the filthy waters of the drainage canals, "so that they may not turn 
sad," as Ofelia put it. I told her never to buy clean vegetables, but 
to prefer them with the sand and grit of mother earth on them; and 
we washed them over and over, and lettuce was soaked with drops of 
iodine to guard against dysentery. 

I hold no brief for the lack of sanitation in Mexico; but I do 
hold one against those Americans who act as if it was all a conspiracy 
against them, and believe that the Mexicans are a healthy people 
who rarely get sick and seldom die. I suggest that they look at the 
mortality statistics, which show a death-rate for Mexico so high that 
few countries in the world can hope to equal it. And I suggest that 
they do so because the first step in understanding a people is to know 
the extent of their mortality, the things from which they suffer and die. 

But the question of time is another story. There I stay with the 
Americans; for the lack of punctuality is really something to shatter 
the well-ordered soul. There is only one thing that ever begins on 
time in Mexico, and that is the bullfight. And yes, the siesta hour 
too. At one o'clock the storekeepers roll down the iron curtains of 
their shops with such zeal and haste that the unwary buyer may well 
be decapitated. But otherwise everything is run as if clocks had 
never been invented, and the time was just something you made 
up out of your own head. The same for the calendar. I went to* 
the University to attend the first class of the term, and found a few 
professors loitering sadly in the patio. 

"Where is the class of Professor Jem^nez Rueda?" I asked. 

The porter pointed to a room on the balcony and chanted, 
"Arriba." 

"But it is dark and no one is there." 

"Yes, it is dark and no one is there." 

"But the classes have begun?" 



SI, NO HAY 47 

"Certainly they have begun." He paused. "Nothing more than 
that the students have not concurred in sufficient numbers. In effect, 
therefore, there are no classes." 

Of course he could have told me that at once, but a Mexican's first 
impulse is to please you by answering yes, and then to add the devas- 
tating detail. ("Do you live with your parents?" I asked the little 
boy who carried my things in the market. "Yes," he said, "only they 
died and I live with my little grandmother.") 

I went back to the University several weeks later, hoping that the 
students had concurred in sufficient numbers. The gates were closed 
and the porter stood outside. "They have all gone out to take the 
census, seriorita, the students as well as the professors." I should have 
known. It was the week of the census and all Mexico was in a state 
of suspended animation. Even the heated election campaign had 
been called off so that people might stay at home to be counted instead 
of running out to cheer their candidates. And every Government 
office was closed tight as a drum, and every school and library was 
closed, and everyone who could handle a brief case was out trying 
to find twenty million Mexicans. It is not every nation that can thus 
take time off to count itself. 

But believing that three is a magic number, I went to the University 
again. The porter looked at me this time as though he was not sure 
but what he might have a mental case on his hands. "Pues ... it 
is Expropriation Day, sefiorita. The commemoration of the expro- 
priation of our petroleum from the North American enterprises. 
There is a magnificent demonstration in the Plaza. Have you seen 
it?" I am not sure what I burbled in reply, but I remember his 
saying, "In Mexico one learns patience." 

And what can one do against such saintly counsel but feel very 
much ashamed ? Besides, it is my belief that one should learn patience 
in a foreign land, for I take it that this is the true measure of travel. 
If one does not suffer some frustration of the ordinary reflexes, how 
can one be sure one is really travelling? Yet I confess there were two 
times when this lofty philosophy of travel always collapsed, and my 
patience quite deserted me. The milk always arrived sour, for the 
delivery boys ride around town on bicycles, with the milk exposed to 
the sun and gently churning itself into buttermilk. It seems that 
nothing can be done about this. And the other time was whenever I 
heard the Mexican storekeeper's "No hay!"* — "There isn't any." 
The Mexicans are certainly not a race of shopkeepers. They open 
stores but take a positive delight in frustrating the customer. Ask 
for what you reasonably expect the store to sell, and nine times out 
of ten the storekeeper begins waving his right forefinger in the air 
like a pendulum, and shakes his head and says: "No hay." It's the 
most negative gesture in the world. That waving forefinger simply 

* Pronounced: No I. 



48 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

expunges what you have asked for from the face of the earth, and 
meanwhile he looks at you in a way that clearly implies that you 
should be ashamed of yourself for asking at all. And there are various 
refinements of it. He may say, "Si, no hay" — "Yes, there isn't any." 
Or, "Ahora no hay" — " Now there isn't any." This implies that it is 
all your fault, since you came just at the wrong time. Now if you 
had only come sooner, oh, just a minute or two sooner. . . . 

But of course this will probably pass when Mexico becomes a 
great industrialized country, like the Colossus to the North, as the 
papers call us; and when storekeepers delight in the abundance on 
their shelves and Mexicans have money to buy the thousand and 
one things that now they are too poor to buy. And then there will 
be a radio in each home, and they will no longer enjoy the sad music 
of the cilindro. It was Ofelia who used to lure the cilindro to our 
street. I came home one warm evening and found all the people 
from the lot gathered on the corner. The men were holding the babies 
on their arms, and the women stood against the building, making a 
frieze of rebozos. 

"Has something happened?" I asked Daniel's sweetheart. 

She looked at me a little contemptuously. "No, it is the music." 

And then I realized that this was a concert, and" that everyone 
was listening to the cilindro. A small, humpbacked, dour-looking 
fellow was grinding it, his head showing above it as on a platter. 
And everyone was counting, for the cilindro will play you Rve songs 
for ten centavos, and not one more or less. So everyone listened 
and counted, and when the last song had been played there was a 
general stirring, and the men looked at each other until someone 
reluctantly drew a coin from his pocket. And after a while no one 
gave any more coins, and the man shifted his cilindro to his back 
and went off, and the people melted away, with a few calls to the 
children and soft 'buenas noches'. 

It is a sad diversion because all hand-organs are sad, and because 
all Mexican songs have a mournful, down-twisting cadence. But 
there is always the sound of the cilindro somewhere on the old colonial 
streets of the poor sections of town. It may be a group of shoemakers, 
busily cobbling around a table in an open stall, who pay for the 
cilindro ; or a servant standing lonely in the door of the house at night. 
She listens and counts the songs, and sometimes the count is wrong 
and it ends in an argument. Or it may be a group of workers waiting 
for the trolley in the clear twilight. They sit on the kerb, very still 
and abstracted as if they were not listening to the music at all, but 
when the five songs are over someone rises and pays again. Then the 
trolley comes and the cilindro-grinder stops in the middle of a phrase 
and goes off, usually with a number of songs still unplayed, which are 
pure profit for him. 

With the new prosperity, Ofelia spent her money recklessly on the 



SI, NO HAY 49 

cilindro. She was selling many eggs and already she had a new pair 
of shoes, several sizes too big to allow for future expansion. But one 
day, while she was mopping the floor, she said: 
"Well, we are going to sell the chickens." 
"Really?" 

"Yes, really. We cannot keep them any more." 
"Then you have found a buyer and a good price?" 
"Oh, no. But Manolo says we must sell them." 
"But that's outrageous. What right has he to tell you?" 
"Pues, we are selling the eggs much cheaper than his, and he 
says we have started competition. Now nobody buys his eggs any 
more." 

"And serves him right. They are too dear." 
"And so tiny, sefiora. Much tinier than ours." 
"They are pigeon eggs, I'm sure. I wouldn't listen to him." 
"But he came to the house last night. He was bravo, muy bravo." 
'Bravo' is many things. A spirited animal is bravo. And piquant 
chile sauce is bravo. And a man like Manolo is bravo. We should 
call him a tough customer. 
"He's a gachupin," I said. 
"What?" 

"Never mind. You just don't listen to him and go on selling your 
eggs." 

"No, we cannot, really. Because Manolo will go to the boss, and 
the boss will take my father off the watch. Already Manolo says that 
my father steals from the buildings at night. Que barbaridad! As 
if my father wouldn't have to replace whatever he steals! But he 
doesn't steal, sefiora, because he doesn't believe in it. He neither 
steals, nor drinks pulque, nor plays rayuela. We are decent people 
and not shameless ones. But this Manolo does not think so. And 
you, sefiora, what do you think?" 

She looked at me fearfully and I scolded her for asking. For I 
had never doubted that the Escotos were decent people, 'gente decente', 
which is a definite class in Mexico. But one must make it known that 
one is of the decent people, for there are other kinds — robbers, sneak- 
thieves, house-breakers, who are also a definite class, and spoken of 
quite as if they were pursuing a legitimate profession. Ofelia had 
pointed out a young man on the lot, saying, quite nonchalantly: 
"They say he's a sneak-thief." Much as one might say: "They say 
he is taking up dentistry." And there are also the sin-vergiienzas, 
the shameless ones. To be a shameless one is to be something very 
definite. I don't know quite what, but it's a recognized career. I 
have always felt a real weakness for the shameless ones. I imagine 
they are good company, full of surprises. 

"You go on selling the eggs," I told Ofelia. "I, for one, will 
continue to buy them. And besides, you could put some in a basket 



50 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

and go on the other side of the Reforma, and sell them from house to 
house." 

"My mother would never permit it." 

"But she lets you go to the church, which is far away too." 

"Yes, senora, but that is the church. I go straight straight, and 
never talk to the peons who call to me." 

"You could talk to the maids on the lawns, and ask them if their 
mistresses might not want nice fresh eggs." 

"Possibly," she conceded. "Though the maids always have their 
sweethearts there, and my mother would not want me to associate 
with them. Besides, I must now take Lupita to the church. She is 
growing up quite a heathen." 

"Well, then there's no remedy," I said, washing my hands of it. 

"Si, no hay remedio," she sighed, very relieved. 

For the sooner a Mexican can reach the point of saying 'no hay 
remedio — there's no remedy for it' — the happier he is. And having 
said it with utter resignation, everything is considered settled, and 
there is no remedy for it. 

But Ofelia rallied in her own defence. "And besides, I am very 
busy now," she said, vigorously swabbing the floor. "For I am 
teaching the catechism to the younger children. I must go every 
Tuesday to read them a portion." 

I knew Ofelia's Catholic zeal, for she delighted in standing at the 
window and informing me about the children playing below: "You 
see, senora, those up to seven years are little angels, and the others 
are all sinners." (Though I confess that from a non-theological point 
of view I could not always tell the difference.) But I had never known 
that she could read. 

"Pues, I really do not," she told me. "It is only that I know the 
words by heart and pretend to read. That is the duty of a teacher. 
I would so like to learn how to read and write, senora, to instruct 
those who are growing up like heathens without the wisdom of the 
Church." 

"But if I teach you," I bargained, "you must also learn such 
ordinary words as broom and mop, and beans and tortillas, that 
you may go to market alone with a list in your hand." 

You bounded up, Ofelia, as if Heaven could not offer more! 
And I saw shining in your face, besides the zeal of the nun, the joy 
of one who knows perfect servanthood. But it was slow, hard work, 
and I bitterly regretted my bargain; for it took a whole morning for 
the precious market list to be written. As for the chickens that started 
all this, they sickened and died sometime later, one by one. And since 
there had been nothing with which to feed them, and since Manolo 
did not wish them to live anyway, it seemed the best thing that could 
happen, and the Escotos accepted it without much grief. 



52 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 



8 



RAIN-SCAPE 

Manolo kept the grocery on the corner, and when I had called 
him a gachupin I was glad that Ofelia did not understand. 
When Mexico was a colony of Spain, the Indians called the 
Spaniards who came there gachupin es. The word means 'spurs' — 
the spurs that the Spaniards wore when on horseback, the spurs of 
their fierce cruelty toward the Indians. To-day the term is still used 
for those Spaniards who come to Mexico looking on it as a barbarous 
country, but who come to make money and then to go back with it 
to Spain. It is a word not to be used lightly, for it may start a fight. 
The Mexicans say that all the groceries are in the hands of gachupines; 
and certainly I never went into one — the prosperous big corner stores, 
and not the sad little stalls where candles and rope-ends are sold — 
without hearing the lisping speech of the old-world Spaniard. Manolo, 
then, was a gachupin, and yet a fine fellow in everything but business. 
He would not stand for competition, and besides the big corner grocery 
he kept the bakery next to it, and ran and unlocked it whenever his 
customers asked for rolls. The neighbourhood was growing fast, 
and there were rumours that he would open a meat store too. So 
that there was no doubt that when all the houses were built, Manolo 
would be the biggest local merchant and a power in the community. 
He lived on the ground floor, and the patio where he lived was filled 
with birds, in which he took a great delight. He had a buxom wife 
and a red-headed baby and a fine voice. On Sundays I used to hear 
him sing — not the songs of Mexico but the strange, twisting airs of 
his native Andalusia. And I thought how it had needed the Moors 
in Spain and the Spaniards in Mexico, to hear those songs of a Sunday 
morning. 

A German couple lived under me. I had greeted them on the 
stairs, but I did not know them. Looking down into their window 
I could see papers laid out with bugs on them. So I decided they 
must be entomologists, which seemed very plausible for a German 
couple. Then there were the lawyer and his wife in the front apart- 
ment. Mexico is full of lawyers without any clients, and he seemed 
to be one of them. He was home all day, and played the guitar and 
sang, though not so well as Manolo. But even if he had no clients, 
he was always given his title, according to Mexican custom. It was : 
"Good morning, licenciado." "Gome in, licenciado." "How is your 
wife, licenciado?" His wife was expecting a baby. She was small 
and dark, rouged and painted, overdressed and perfumed. Every 



RAIN-SCAPE 53 

morning she went to church, wearing a black veil and with a prayer- 
book in her hand. 

The licenciado and his wife had a maid whom it was a delight 
to see in the morning when she came down from her room on the roof, 
washed and combed. She was not merely clean, she was burnished. 
Her black hair and golden skin caught the light like metal. And she 
was handsome, with marked eyebrows and a vivid smile. She had 
a little girl called Nicolausa. Nicolausa sat on the stairs all day, 
bewitching everyone who passed. She was even prettier than her 
mother, and already, with her four-year-old charms, she could break 
a man's heart. She was a siren, an enchantress, and if the stairs had 
been rocks with ships going by, the place would have been strewn 
with wrecks. Surely Nicolausa knew, when she smiled showing all 
her tiny white teeth, that she was irresistible. And when her hair 
was combed in three fat braids and tied artfully over her forehead, 
she seemed the very incarnation of the mujercita, the little woman — 
in Mexico a term of sexual affection, and not as with us a vaudeville 
joke. 

There was always some young man stealing up the stairs to see 
Nicolausa's mother. He would talk to her while she did the washing 
on the roof, her hair shining blue-black in the sun. But none of these 
young fellows seemed to be Nicolausa's father. I asked Ofelia whether 
the child had a father, and she said, thoughtfully considering, "No, 
I believe not," as one who takes it for granted that there may be 
children with mothers, but no fathers. 

Mexico City has thousands of children whose fathers have aban- 
doned the home, and many more who are utterly homeless. They 
live on the streets, ragged little urchins, prematurely old in face, 
precocious in vice ; and because they are such distorted, queer, dwarfed 
copies of adults, tourists like to look at them and murmur, "How cute !" 
They are the bootblacks who stand outside the hotels, calling "Grasa" 
for the Mexicans, and "Shine" for the Americans; and the 'cryers' 
who run through the streets hoarsely croaking the afternoon papers. 
In the afternoon one cannot pass through the first street of Bucareli 
where the 'cryers' gather, waiting for the big papers to issue their 
scurrilous afternoon editions. There is always a horde of them, 
barefoot, dirty, ragged to the point of nakedness; and they fight and 
gamble and abuse the passers-by. When the papers come out, there 
is a frenzied dispersal, and they rush through the streets yelling insanely, 
and board buses and invade restaurants ; and because of this ragged 
maniacal army of 'cryers' all the news of the world seems evil. 

The children sell lottery tickets, frequent saloons and the cheap 
movies, deal in drugs and stolen goods. And they accept the open 
obscenities of the Guatemotzin — the prostitutes' street — with calm 
and a cynical foul word. If you frequent the poorer restaurants you 
learn that they are very hungry. They come in and want to shine 



54 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

your shoes or sell you a lottery ticket. But if you don't want a shine 
or a lottery ticket, then they beg for the roll on your plate or the 
leavings of your meal; and if the waitress is kind, she will wait until 
they have scavenged to satiety before removing the dishes. 

There was one child who came in regularly at El Chino's, on the 
Avenida Juarez. He never bothered with preliminaries. He came 
in to eat and that was all. First, he would beg the waitress for per- 
mission to scavenge, whining and twisting his face — a necessary busi- 
ness. But when he had finished scavenging he was a changed boy. 
He set his cap defiantly, thanked the waitress with a royal air, and 
walked out like one who has dined well at his favourite club. Some- 
one has said that if you like horses you should not go to bullfights. 
And if you like children, perhaps you should not go to Mexico 
City. 

These homeless children do not exist because their parents are 
Mexicans nor because of the Mexican Revolution. They are the 
fine flower of the four hundred years of Mexican history since the 
conquest. For four hundred years Mexicans have been exploited, 
despoiled, and plundered, from the time when Cortes and his men, 
fleeing the wrath of the Aztecs, set to work and loaded themselves 
with all the gold in Montezuma's palace, through three centuries 
more when other conquerors came with the surveying rod and oil 
drill, to rob the Mexicans of their land and its resources, of their lives 
and their happiness. And the Revolution is the protest against this, 
the return to decency. As a revolution it is too big for the landowners 
and too small for the communists; but it will do, if permitted to take 
its course, to bring decent homes, decent food, and decent wages to 
Mexico's twenty million, most of whom now lack all these things. If 
the Revolution accomplishes this, it will solve the problem of the 
homeless children ; but not the problem of the children who now roam 
the streets, the blighted generation of a diseased, undernourished, 
blighted parent stock. It is too late for them. But the hope is that in 
the future there will no longer be such homeless children, nor districts 
in the city where one sees no child over five, because at that age they 
abandon the unspeakable hovels where they live to fend for themselves 
on the streets. 

This is the belief of Manrique, who is a revolutionary — not one 
who mouths the word lightly and for his own ends, of which Mexico 
has many. Manrique fought in the Revolution and he remembers 
the years of bloodshed and violence. Now he is in his forties — tall, 
thin, scholarly, and somewhat sad, and still serving the cause for which 
he fought, humbly and prosaically in the classroom. For he believes 
that education is the redeeming force, the indispensable agent in 
shaping the future Mexico. Manrique delights in winning a child 
for the public schools, as though he were a priest winning a soul. 
He does not think that Ofelia's learning to write words like broom 



R A I N - S C A P E 55 

and mop is sufficient. He believes she should be in school, learning 
that Mexico is a nation and that she is part of it. 

Ofelia knows so little about her country that when I told her 
Mexico had oceans on each side of it she was surprised, as if she had 
never thought of Mexico as part of the earth with definite limits; 
and I had to explain to her the meaning of boundaries and about the 
twenty-eight states of Mexico and their capitals. She received this 
information with polite attention, but with a definite look of scepticism. 
The Mexico beyond her tierra of Atotonilco was unreal, a difficult 
idea to grasp, something that queer Americans talked about. Even 
the city itself was unreal. She went to church and she went to market, 
for the necessities of body and soul. But she had been to the city 
proper, the modern heart of the city which Mexicans call 'el centro', 
only once. This was to attend a special Mass in the Cathedral on the 
Great Plaza. And afterward Papa Escoto had rushed the whole 
family home, as if the evil influences of the city thickened and grew 
stronger at its centre. And there might be an excursion to Chapultepec 
on a Sunday, when the whole family got dressed up — Sefior Escoto 
in clean blue overalls and the women in their best black rebozos — 
and marched in a restrained procession to the park, to climb the 
pleasant shaded stone steps to the castle where Maximilian and Garlota 
once lived. But these were excursions of the whole tribe, including the 
aunts and the little grandmother, a carefully sheltered pleasure and 
a simple one; for the Mexicans spend their afternoon at the castle 
sitting on the marble benches, and gazing toward the mountains 
and saying ever so often, "Que bonito!" — "How pretty!" Only 
Daniel went around alone, having reached the mature age of sixteen, 
and having, in addition, a sweetheart. Though he was last to come 
to the city, he very soon appeared in city clothes and in a city hat. 
But only for Sundays, and then for just a few hours. 

The rains began soon after Daniel came. They began early and 
in full force, and then it was harder to get rid of Ofelia when her work 
was done. 

"Well, senora, it is going to rain," she would announce, looking 
at the angry froth of purple clouds in the eastern sky. 

"Then you must hurry and get home." 

"I will be caught in the rain." 

"But you have only three steps to go." 

"Yes, but the rains will catch me." 

And while we argued the rain came, the thunderous drumming 
incontinent downpour which may last ten minutes or the whole 
afternoon. This is the spring of Mexico, the rainy season that ends 
the long golden monotony of the dry months. But it is no pleasant 
spring of burgeoning trees and greening lawns. It is not a season 
for a poet, but one for priests and a primitive religion; for the rains 



56 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

come with elemental force, scourging the earth wrathfully each 
day. 

If you must be caught in the rain, be caught in the market-place. 
It is like seeing the approach of doom. The pedlars wait until the 
last minute under the livid sky, and their cries sound far away and 
faint against the roll of thunder. Then the first drops fall and there 
is a frantic rout, a folding of tents, dumping of vegetables, and scurry- 
ing away, and in the next minute nothing but the empty streets awash 
like a ship in a storm, and desolate as if humanity had never been there. 

Or watch the rain from under a tree on the Reforma, where you 
will be thoroughly drenched but unable to move, because the rain is 
an impenetrable wall around you. It thunders down in white spears, 
with a roar of wind in which the palm trees flail like straws and blots 
out the world; and there is only a solitary charro on horseback, a 
black silhouette against the rain. He sits under his poncho, becalmed, 
and you think the rain must have beaten horse and rider to death. 
But then the white spears thin out, the air grows lighter and the rain 
darker, the sun appears and the charro rides away, his wet poncho 
shining. 

I liked the rainy season better than the dry, because I like weather 
better than climate. The dry season is a golden vacuum; but the 
rainy season has change, which is weather. And while climate may 
create a race, weather creates the temper and sensibility of the indi- 
vidual. Most mornings were still clear, with a blue sky more brilliant 
than ever. But there were some that were dull and pleasantly clouded 
with premonition of the rain. And the skies that came before and 
after each day's cloudburst were, so to speak, not of this earth. 

Perhaps it is the rarefied atmosphere that gives the clouds their 
solidity, their depth and effulgence of colour. They rise from the 
mountains in the early afternoon and fill the sky, inexhaustible as 
chaos, sweeping the earth with a splendour of shafted light. Slowly 
the hot white masses and purple depths begin to lose colour. A livid 
grey suffuses and melts them, and then the rain rips from a sky grown 
hard and opaque as metal. I would look down and see Sefior Escoto 
and the other men of the lot frantically trying to keep the rain from 
flooding the huts. They put old newspapers on the roofs and weighted 
them with stones, but it did not help. 

"The whole house got wet," Ofelia would report, making it harder 
for me to send her away. So she stayed in the rainy afternoons, and 
sewed and sang the song of Atotonilco, her tierra. "In that Atotonilco 
the orange trees are in flower, the maidens appear like little angels of 
God. Now the season makes my heart leap. Ay, 'Totonilco!" She 
talked endlessly of her tierra, and often illustrated a point by saying 
wisely: "And therefore our songs says. . . ." And then she sang a 
new song, but usually too much off key for me to get the melody. 
And we sang 'La Adelita', the song of the Revolution, which Mexicans ' 



RAIN-SCAPE 57 

do not sing much now, though Americans like to bawl it in cantinas, 
beating out the time with their beer mugs. 

"There in the depth of a wild mountain pass, 
A regiment found itself encamped; 
And a valiant maiden foil owed it, 
Madly enamoured of a sergeant" 

This maiden was Adelita, who was pretty as well as valiant, very 
popular with the troop and respected even by the colonel. It is a 
long story, romantic and sad, and capable of going on for ever, if 
one is to sing all the verses that have ever been written. But Ofelia 
always paused thoughtfully after the stanza where the sergeant, going 
forth to battle, begs Adelita to weep for him with her own eyes. 

"Just imagine, sefiora," she said once while the song still echoed 
in the room. "There was a man in my tierra who was the sweetheart 
of Adelita." 

"But do you think she really lived?" 

"Obviously, for there is the song about her. And besides, this 
man was her sweetheart." 

"And what happened?" 

"Well, she wanted to marry him, but this man did not care for 
her." 

"How strange!" 

"Of course, for she was very beautiful. I certainly would have 
married her. But this man did not care for her, which shows how 
stupid he was. Que tortuga !" she said contemptuously, of the man 
who had spurned Adelita. "What a turtle! And now he is old, oh, 
very old, and no one would think of marrying him." 

She sewed thoughtfully for a while and then asked me, trying to 
contain her laughter: "Do you know the name of Manolo's clerk?" 

"Never thought of it." 

"It is" — she burst out giggling — "Edouardo!" 

"Well, that's a nice name." 

"Si? De veras? — Really?" she mocked, giggling until the tears 
came to her eyes. "Edouardo!" she repeated lingeringly. 
"Ed-ou-ardo!" and then she wiped her eyes and began to sew again. 

"And do you know, sefiora, that Nicolausa's mother has a 
sweetheart?" 

"Well, I thought she had many." 

"Oh, no. She now has a very special one. She goes out to meet 
him every night. But he is very ugly. He has a snout like this" — 
she stuck out her lower lip. "I would never choose such an ugly 
sweetheart." 

"And is Edouardo good-looking?" 

She went off into giggles again. "He chases me out of the store. 



58 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

He's very nasty. But I have made him chase me all the way into the 
hall here." 

"And then what happened?" 

"Pues, nada. I only wanted him to chase me. Do you know, 
se flora, I think you ought to get married." 

"Really!" 

"Yes, really! I have been thinking you should marry a mordelon, 
because then you would be rich and also you could ride on his 
motor-cycle." 

"But what's a mordelon?" I asked. 

She looked at me mischievously. "Well, there is one who flirts 
with me on the Re forma when I go to church. But I answer him 
with vulgarities, for that is the only way to shame them. They are 
very presuming, senora. Because of their uniforms and their motor- 
cycles. And because, of every bite that they take, they swallow some, 
and so they always have money and are very forward with the girls." 

Then I understood. My mordelon was literally 'the big biter', 
the representative of the law who fines the unwary motorist on the 
Reforma. 

"Yes, senora, they swallow most of the bites and are quite rich. 
You couldn't do better, senora, really. And I could get you one from 
the Reforma very easily. I would simply crook my finger thus, and 
smile at him, and tell him there's an Americana who would like to 
meet him. Well ... do you want it arranged?" 

"Oh, by all means." And long after I had forgotten about my 
mordelon, she would come rushing up the stairs, quite breathless, to 
tell me she had just seen one on his motor-cycle, only he went by so 
fast that she could not catch him for me. Still, she said, I must not 
lose hope. 



9 



'FROM THIS WE MUST FORGE A NATION' 

I was wrong about the German couple. They were not entomolo- 
gists. They made chocolate for a living, and they were refugees, 
very homesick for the Germany they had fled from. Ernst was 
a musician. He played the viola, and when I heard him playing I 
knew that I must shut all my windows when I played the violin. 
Comparisons are odious. One day Ernst met me in the hall, looked 
at me from behind his glasses, and said: "You play abominably. 
And you play the same thing over and over, until I go crazy. Haven't 
you any music?" 



60 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

I said that I hadn't, and he offered to lend me some. "For my 
own sanity," he explained, eyeing me fiercely. "And don't play that 
first exercise o f Kreutzer so much. You'll wear it away." He leaned 
his viola case against the wall, and loosed a quite detached pedagogic 
chuckle. "NoW let's see your fingers." 

He studied my fingers, really like an entomologist examining a 
specimen, I thought. "Ach — callouses!" He was thoroughly pleased. 

"The French school! Your fingers hit the strings like — like " 

His terrible Spanish halted and collapsed. 

* "Like sledge-hammers," I furnished blandly, but he went on with 
undiminished ferocity. 

"Relax! Relax when you play. Why play the violin if you feel 
like choking it?" 

"Why, indeed?" I echoed mentally, while his wife joined us. 

She was younger than Ernst, and pretty, with cornflower hair 
turning grey. "Don't mind Ernst," she said pleasantly, in English 
as bad as his Spanish. "He is very aufgeregt." 

Ernst turned on her a lamb-like look for the merest second. Then 
his face grew fierce again, he raised his arms and his voice broke 
despairingly. "But she plays so abominably. Ach, Gott! And we 
are neighbours." 

"Sh — Ernst! Perhaps the fraiilein understands German." In 
dumb show she indicated that he must not be taken seriously. He 
was very nervous. "It's the climate," she whispered. "He suffers 
much here. He has nose-bleeds." 

"She needs instruction," Ernst said. 

"She will have instruction. You will come, won't you, to take 
lessons from Ernst? It will really make him very happy. He has 
not had a pupil here in Mexico." 

I nodded rather reluctantly. 

"You need not pay," she said, pushing Ernst toward the door. 
"Only come, come because it will make him so happy." 

They went out, and Ernst looked back at me with the lamb-like 
expression that seemed always to replace his ferocity. He smiled 
quite shyly. "Yes, you will come," he said, very pleased. "And 
now — now I go to play chamber music." 

I went upstairs thinking about them, and for some reason they 
made me feel very sad. 

There was always coffee after the lesson, and I learned to play 
less abominably, and Ernst grew lamb-like more often, which was his 
natural state except when one played badly. Then he could be 
bravo, muy bravo, in the way the Mexicans use the word of an 
irritated animal, wild and ready to attack. 

"Look," he would explode, "you play like the senile old violist 
in the orchestra in Germany." He sat down with his instrument, 
dropped his elbow to his knee, smiled inanely and crossed his eyes, 



'FROM THIS WE MUST FORGE A NATION' 61 

and then began to bow the strings with horrible feebleness. "Yes," 
he nodded, "that's how he plays, and there's one in every orchestra, 
but the conductor can't fire him out of pity. And he can't play, he 
can't play any more." He continued nodding his head, staring before 
him, and then he got up and wiped his face and I saw that beads of 
sweat had come out on his forehead. 

"You!" he said angrily. "You do not have to stir chocolate all 
day, and yet you cannot play." He started a movement of the 
Beethoven concerto with a sweep and sonority of tone that brought 
Lutzie to the door, listening to him. . 

"If only he could practice," she told me sadly. "If only there 
were more music in Mexico. But he must stand all day making the 
chocolate, and then I must go to the German stores to sell it, and the 
men put their hands heavily on my shoulder and say: 'But of course 
you are not Jews, because we do not want Jewish chocolate.' And 
I lie and say no, we are not Jews. It is bitter bread, my child, bitter 
bread." 

I used to go up to the little room on the roof where they made the 
chocolate and help Ernst sometimes. They had all sorts of pots 
and pans that they had brought from Germany, and grinding and 
pounding machines, and everything was kept as sparkingly clean as 
the machinery on a ship. Everything had to be 'sauber' — clean. 
'Sauber' was their god, their standard of right and wrong. A thing 
was or was not sauber. That was all that mattered about it. A 
person was or was not sauber. The floor in their apartment sparkled 
like gold, and their huge pillows and feather-bed bulged in the win- 
dows every morning, taking the sun; and they wore themselves thin 
and ill keeping things sauber, down to the last nail, the smallest 
cranny. That was why they did not like the Escotos. They were not 
sauber. When they talked to me of the Escotos it was always in 
German, as if only that language had the words they needed. 

"And the senor is ekelhaft faul!" Ernst would splutter. 
"Disgustingly lazy! All day he does nothing." 

"But he works at night," I objected. 

"Works! Is that work, sitting there in his sarape half-asleep? 
And have you noticed how he hangs around the corner all day, 
talking to Manolo?" 

Yes, I had noticed. Senor Escoto had that Mexican way of 
standing for hours on one spot, relaxed and untiring, as if the air 
supported him comfortably; and had I not seen him on the corner 
I would have missed him, his smile and his greeting. But I had 
often wondered when he slept, and now I had my first misgiving that 
perhaps he was lazy. For if a man forgoes needed sleep, which it is 
his duty to take, in favour of loafing on a street corner, can one not 
say that he is lazy after all, superbly so? 

"And who do you think commits all the robberies in the house?" 



62 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

Lutzie added. "Who but Herr Escoto, who has a pass-key to all the 
apartments!" 

"Do you know that he has one?" 

"Obviously he has. For how else could he commit the robberies?" 

"No, I don't believe it." 

"Child! Don't be foolish. Watch Herr Escoto, I warn you. 
Don't ever let him enter the apartment. And it is very wrong of 
you to have Ofelia there, finding out where everything is." 

I quailed guiltily before her, for I had given the Escotos a key to 
my apartment. Being a chronic key-forgetter, I would come home 
and find myself locked out. And then I would have to call Sefior 
Escoto, and he would have to call Daniel, and they would fetch a 
rope and go up on the roof, and Daniel would be hoisted down over 
the wall, dangling perilously in the air until he managed to open 
my window or break it. This furnished a pleasant circus for all the 
women on the lot, who gathered to watch it; but I felt that such scenes 
reflected on the efficiency of the Americans, and must end. So I had 
given the Escotos a key. True, the house was subject to robberies — 
bold large-scale robberies that might occur in broad daylight, as if 
some invisible spirit made free with the apartments. But it had 
simply never occurred to me that they were the work of Seiior Escoto. 
Yet under Lutzie's severe blue eye I had a moment of misgiving. And 
yet, I reasoned, how could he be the guilty one, if my apartment 
was the only one that had never been touched ? And then the relent- 
less bad logic of suspicion made me think: But that proves it! I 
reddened with anger, not at Senor Escoto, but at the Germans. And 
then at myself, because I remembered the gold cigarette lighter that 
he had used so furtively, that night of my visit to the hut when Daniel 
came. 

"Yes, mark my words," Lutzie was saying, "Herr Escoto is not 
in order." 

Yet for all their suspicion they were good-hearted. They plied 
Ofelia with chocolate until she was sick, and bought dolls for Nicolausa, 
whom they petted and admired inordinately. It was only that clean- 
liness and order were the all-important virtues, and they probably 
would have felt themselves slipping morally had they not spent part 
of each day suspecting that things were not clean enough, and that 
their neighbours were not absolutely in order. And besides, they were 
in a strange land, exiled and home-sick. "Que bonito!" Ernst would 
say, just like a Mexican, while he paused in the chocolate-making 
to look off toward the mountains. But at those times I saw in his 
eyes a great sadness, and perhaps the memory of another landscape, 
more familiar, more placid, and certainly more orderly. Then he 
would return to his chocolate-mixing with renewed vigour. 

"Everything must be done with relaxation," he would say, 
mixing away and eyeing me sternly from behind his glasses. He looked 



'FROM l^IS WE MUST FORGE A NATION 5 63 

ludicrous in his long chocolate-spattered smock, and with a heavy 
muffler tied around his neck to protect his clean white collar. 
"Whether it's making chocolate or playing the violin. Observe my 
arm. The power comes from the shoulder, the rest is relaxed. With 
relaxation one can work endlessly." 

"Then the Mexicans should accomplish a great deal," I said. 
"They are always relaxed." 

He snorted angrily. "Ach — the Mexicans! It's not the same 
thing. You do not understand," he added sadly. 

But I did. This German relaxation was a strenuous matter, some- 
thing to be achieved by thought and care and exercise, and not just 
a careless gift from the gods. At the beginning of every lesson we 
had to limber up first, like athletes. We would take our places facing 
the wall, I with my violin and Ernst with his viola. Then, at a signal, 
we lifted our instruments, braced them against the wall, and began 
our arm movements. There was no sound, thirty times for each 
exercise, finger-flexing, wrist-flexing, and woe to me if I smiled! 
"Nicht lachen!" Ernst thundered. "How can one learn to play if 
one is not serious?" And we continued, until Lutzie came and stood 
in the doorway, to look at us pityingly. "Enough, Ernst! Let the 
poor child alone! After all, it is not her profession." 

"Which means nothing," Ernst delivered himself. "After all, you 
play or you don't." But we left the wall and took up our bows. 

"The action of playing the violin," Ernst said, looking at me with 
his bow poised over the strings, "is precisely like that of shooting a 
gun. Have you ever used a gun, fraulein?" 

"Yes, once in Connecticut. We shot at empty bottles " 

"Then you understand," he went on impatiently. "You hold the 
left arm — so, just as you would a gun. And then the right arm high, 
as when you pull the trigger. And just as you would sight the target, 
the head must be so, facing front. Now! Let me see." 

I tried it, and he said it was very good. And thus, with this military 
send-off, we launched into the graceful andante of Mozart's 'Nacht- 
musik'. We were going through it in preparation for the first meeting 
of the orchestra. Ernst and some other German refugees were starting 
one, and I would be allowed to play second fiddle. 

One morning our playing was really interrupted by a sound as of 
shooting. We rushed to the window and saw the peons who worked 
on the building across the street setting off firecrackers, throwing them 
into the air with such speed and energy that one would have thought 
their lives depended on it. The firecrackers zoomed into the blue sky, 
exploded with little puffs of white smoke. Soon the sound came from 
other buildings, from other streets, from all over the city. It was 
deafening, as if the city were under bombardment. Downstairs we 
found all the people from the lots gathered outside Manolo's store. 



64 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

"Que bonito!" they said, looking up and admiring the smoke of battle 
that drifted over the houses. "And the cross, que bonito !" On the 
roof of the building the peons had erected a wooden cross splendidly 
festooned with coloured paper ribbons and ivy wreaths. "To bless 
the new work," Edouardo explained. 

There was much drinking on all the unfinished buildings through 
the rest of the day, and the explosions of firecrackers kept booming 
over the city and did not die out until late afternoon. And then 
came another sound — the siren of the ambulances going to pick up 
the workers who had fallen off the buildings. But by night it was 
quiet, with only the wind rustling the paper ribbons on the crosses, 
a mysterious sound as if pagan gods were abroad. Every unfinished 
building in the city had its cross, even the steel skeletons of the sky- 
scrapers in the centre of town; though Ofelia was sure that none could 
be as splendid as the one Daniel had made for the building where 
he watched. Coming home late one night I went out of my way to 
see it. The cross was there, but not Daniel. Then something moved 
in the shadows. It was Daniel with his sweetheart. He held her hand 
and they went into the darkness of the building, treading carefully 
over the rubble-strewn floor. Yet when I reached home I saw his 
sweetheart come from the lot and walk towards Manolo's store. It 
troubled me as I went upstairs. How could she have reached the lot 
as quickly as I did ? I would have heard her if she had followed me. 
But I had come down the dark street alone, hearing only the sound 
of the wind rustling through the crosses. 

"I suppose Daniel will get married soon," I remarked to Ofelia, 
on the afternoon following, when the rain had imprisoned us. 

She considered. "We do not know, senora. He is very camote." 

I reached for the dictionary, a business that never failed to amuse 
her. Camote: sweet-potato. 

"And what does it mean to be camote?" 

"Pues, nowadays," she said sagely, "all the young men are very 
camote. They lack responsibility, senora, and think only of their own 
good times." She sighed as one who had known many betrayals, 
though actually her interest in such matters had passed. She had 
forgotten about Edouardo and the mordelon, for this was the period 
of the fairy tales. Every day she told me the fairy tales she had heard 
in her tierra. They were Puss-in-Boots, Snow- White, and all the old 
tales over again, only enchantingly disguised. The good fairy was 
always the Virgin of Guadalupe, who appeared in all her splendour 
at the right moments. And the poor princess was set to grinding corn 
at the metate instead of spinning; and Red Riding Hood carried gifts 
of tortillas and chile to her grandmother, and even the little rabbit 
did not have his cabbage patch, but was caught stealing black beans. 
Then she told me of the ghosts that haunted the night roads of her 
tierra. The ghosts, however, were quite native. Ofelia had not seen 



c FROM THIS WE MUST FORGE A NATION* 65 

any, but her father and mother had seen them often. They were not 
even decent ghosts, but 'espantos' — frightful things. 

"And does your mother see them here in the city?" 

"Pues, si!" she said. "Only the other night " And it was a 

tale to curdle one's blood. There were also serpents that fell with the 
rain. She told me one had fallen in the house just a few days ago, 
visible to all, and causing great consternation. Then she added with 
a luxurious shudder: "Que horror !" 

I had to typewrite all the fairy tales for her, for the typewriter 
fascinated her. Already she could read a little, and when she took 
the paper in her hand, and, knowing the story, was able to read it, 
she was overawed as if at a miracle — that the paper could indeed give 
back the fairy tale to her. 

"If you could only go to school, Ofelia." 

"Yes," she said sadly, "but my mother would never permit it. 
She says the boys will lead me away and teach me bad things. But I 
don't care for them at all, sefiora. To-day there were two little old 
men in the meat-store, and they began to jest with me, and I answered 
them with vulgarities — the coarsest things to say that I could think of. 
They shut up, then, and slunk away. And that's what I always do." 

And a very good tactic, I thought. "But if you went to school 
you might become a teacher." 

"No, sefiora." She was proudly resigned. "I cannot think of 
that. Besides, they teach evil things in the schools. That is what the 
priest said. No, sefiora, I am content to be a maid. Only I would so 
like to wear a real maid's apron. My aunt and I saw the loveliest 
ones in the market at Santa Julia, just like those they wear on the 
Reforma, and very cheap. We went there to buy shoes for Saint 
Pancracio, he who was martyred so young." 

"Ofelia ! You didn't spend your last salary on shoes for the saint!" 

"In the end, no," she remembered, sighing. "Think of it. We 
looked all over the Santa Julia market, and then we went to the 
Merced, and then to the market of Tacubaya, looking for little white 
shoes with red ribbons. But they were all too expensive, as a result 
of which we could not buy them." 

"But you need shoes more than the saint!" 

She looked at me a moment as if undecided whether to be shocked, 
and then it struck her as a very witty thing I had said, and she giggled 
appreciatively. But the more she thought about it, the wittier it 
seemed — this juxtaposition of her need and the saint's. And long 
after, I would hear her repeating the words softly to herself, and in- 
wardly laughing. 

"Now, Ofelia, you are going to meet Manrique," I said firmly. 
"This very night when he comes here." 
"El maestro?" 
"EI maestro." 



66 THEDAYSOF OF EL I A 

She looked aghast. The idea of meeting him terrified her because, 
as a teacher, he represented that authority to which she was truant. 
"No, senora, please " 

But all her pleadings and excuses did not help. Manrique came 
punctually as usual, for he prided himself on having an American 
consciousness of the time. And when she stood before him with her 
back pressed against the wall, as if she might find a miraculous escape 
through it, he looked at her and said: "You come from the lowland." 

She nodded her head, but she would not look up. 

"And I will tell you the very part of the lowland that you come 
from," Manrique continued, while Ofelia eyed him sideways, beguiled 
by this divination. 

"You come from Jalisco." 

"Yes," she said. 

"And I will tell you the very village in Jalisco that you come 
from. It is Atotonilco." 

Her eyes widened and she looked up smiling. "Pues, si! That is 
my pueblo." 

"It is a region of valiant men and beautiful women. Proverbial," 
Manrique said; "the reputation of the men for valour, and of the 
women for beauty." 

"Do you hear, Ofelia, what el maestro says of your tierra?" 

"Yes, senora." 

"But they are conservative," he went on, shaking his head. "Very 
conservative. They sigh for the times of Porfirio Diaz. They are not 
with us in the Revolution." 

"But Ofelia knows nothing of the Revolution. ..." 

"Oh, but I do, senora." She was suddenly voluble. "For my 
mother speaks of it often. How the federals came from one side and 
the rebels came from the other, and there was much shooting and 
people were murdered and hung from the trees. It was bad, senora, 
very bad." 

"We had to win our freedom in blood and violence," Manrique 
said with a sad reasonableness, while Ofelia looked at him, wide- 
eyed. "But now there are schools. Schools for you, Ofelia." He took 
off his glasses, wiped them, and put them back, and his face grew 
stern as he leaned forward to her. "You must go to school, Ofelia, 
do you hear? You must go to school." 

There was such intensity in his voice and such sternness in his 
face that she shrank away from him, covered her eyes, and burst 
into tears. 

"I know, I know," she wept, in an extremity of confession. "I 
am ashamed, I am ashamed that I do not go to school." And not 
all our coaxing could make her stop crying or look up again. 

"Ofelia!" Manrique said, more gently. "Ofelia . . ." But she 
drew away from him, crying bitterly. He shook his head, looking 



THE STUPID OTOMfS 67 

utterly sad and defeated; and though he did not speak I knew what 
the words would have been, for I had heard them often: "There, you 
see? That is our problem. They will not come to the schools. There 
are so many that we cannot reach, so many. . . ." 

Later I asked him how he had guessed so exactly where Ofelia 
came from. "There is nothing to it," he said, with a self-deprecatory 
smile. "One can usually tell, because we Mexicans are not one 
race. We are still a people of tribes, as we were before the conquest. 
There were many different Indian tribes before the conquest, and 
the blood of the conquerors was only a few drops in an ocean. The 
blood of others, too — the negroes, the Chinese, the French — how we 
are mixed, and yet we are still mostly Indian. Our faces" — he stroked 
his own by way of demonstration — "are still Aztec or Otomi, or 
Mayan or Zapotecan, or whatever you wish. The other blood only 
made the variations and gave some differences of speech and gesture. 
I have travelled all over my country, and I know what face and speech 
come from each region. And the region also leaves its stamp — the 
hot and the cold, the dry or wet, mountain and desert and jungle — 
these, too, have formed us with an endless variety of climate and 
conditions." 

He was silent a moment "Yes, sefiorita," he concluded rather 
sadly. "From this we must forge a nation, from these tribes and 
from this variety." 



10 



THE STUPID OTOMfS 

I remembered his words a few days later, as I walked on the road 
to Ixmiquilpan, in the Valley of the Mesquite, where the Otomis 
live. On each side of the road I saw their grass huts. They are built 
so small that one must enter them stooping, and the eye can hardly 
distinguish them in the fields from the growths of cactus and mesquite. 
Looking at the parched fields and the mountains beyond — the strange 
mountains where the barren rock burned purple in the sun — I re- 
membered Manrique's words: 'We are various, formed by mountain 
and desert. Here were mountain and desert, the barren Valley of the 
Mesquite, the blighted land to which the Otomis fled, a conquered 
people long before the coming of the Spaniards. And here in the 
Valley of the Mesquite they had been formed, through four hundred 
years of desert poverty.' 

It was Monday, and the Otomis were going to market. They 
Streamed in from the fields and swarmed on the highway, a small 



THE STUPID OTOMIS 69 

earth-brown people, barefoot and ragged, bringing their poor pro- 
duce to the plaza at Ixmiquilpan. They brought tunas, the watery- 
fruit of the nopal, and beans and charcoal and cloths woven of maguey 
fibre. Long before the conquest the Otomis were famous as weavers 
of this cloth, and they roamed far and wide as merchants of it. And 
to-day it is still their most important product, their only form of 
commerce with the outside world. Now, as they came in from the fields, 
many of them — men and women alike — carried a distaff on the 
shoulder, deftly spinning the fibre of maguey as they trudged to 
market. 

Without the maguey plant the Otomis could not live. It gives a 
tall stalk for making their huts, and a dry grass for fuel, and a fibre 
for spinning. It is shelter and warmth, and clothing and commerce. 
It is food and water, too, for it gives the juice from which pulque is 
made. In the Valley of the Mesquite there is no water for drinking. 
From Mexico City the black polluted waters of the canals drain into 
the valley; but of this black water the Otomis say: "Boil it, boil it 
again, and boil it a third time. Then throw it away and take your 
drink of pulque." An Otomi labourer working on the haciendas 
receives half of his wages in pulque — half of the forty centavos that 
he gets for working from dawn to dark. It is wages in death, for, 
though pulque gives nourishment and strength to work for a time, 
it brings in the end weakness and disease and death. 

Land without water! When I had left the highway and entered 
the streets of Ixmiquilpan, I walked ankle-deep in soft immemorial 
dust. The air itself was dusty, and even the mountains looming beyond 
the plaza seemed made of dust, an eternity of dust for the dry air to 
feed on. Land without water, as though Creation had faltered and 
given of only one element — a land that awaits the bridegroom. And 
because there is no water one thinks constantly of the sea. There, 
beyond that dip in the mountains^ there is a stretch of sky that looks 
like the sea ! But it is a mirage, the wish-fulfilment of the eyes tired of 
dust. 

There are five thousand Otomis in the Valley of the Mesquite, 
only a few of the hundreds of thousands in all Mexico. All do not 
five in the poverty of those in the Valley of the Mesquite. An agri- 
cultural people before the Aztecs conquered them and drove them 
from the fertile lands, they are now good agriculturists wherever they 
have land that will yield. And with the Otomis there are about five 
million Indians of different tribes, and more than that number of 
mestizos who live under the same cultural and economic conditions 
as the Indians. They form the great majority of Mexico's population. 
Since the Revolution there have been many slogans for redeeming 
the Indian. He would be incorporated to civilization, or civilization 
would be incorporated to him. But now the economic needs of the 
country have acted as a solvent on slogans. The Indians are recog- 



70 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

nized as the great mass of the rural population, the 'arms' that must 
bring Mexico's backward agriculture to more abundance. So that 
their education has become a double-edged sword. A greater abund- 
ance in their lives means greater abundance for the country — a 
double-edged sword or a benign circle. That is the dream of the 
young revolutionaries who go as teachers to the remote hidden pueblos, 
to the malaria-ridden sierras. No facile dream, for the roll of rural 
school-teachers has its martyrs. 

I had come to Ixmiquilpan the night before and stayed in the 
not very palatial Hotel Palacio. At night the town had been deserted 
and an air of desolation hung over the lampless, dusty streets. But 
now in the morning I walked through a crowded plaza, looking for 
Senor Rios, who had shown me the school. I found him in a booth 
taking refrescos. "What have you bought?" he greeted me. "Pues, 
nada." "You must buy a woven sash and an ayate — a woven bag. 
The Otomis are great weavers." There were a few boys from the 
school with him. They looked very workmanlike in their blue overalls, 
and they were alert and smiling — a different race from the Otomis 
who sat beside their wares in the market. 

There had been no classes that day, for the market-day is all- 
important, no more to be violated than a religious festival. It would 
be a day of diversion for them — bathing in a little stream and then 
practice for the band. Later they would go back to the school in the 
Government truck. It stood waiting in the plaza, a very large truck 
lettered: 'Department of Indigenous Affairs' — and a novelty in 
Ixmiquilpan, where only the bus comes and a rare tourist car. Nor 
is there any motion-picture house either. There is an old theatre that 
flourished in colonial times, but now it is used only for political meet- 
ings. And there are no newspapers. "But what good are newspapers 
in Spanish," said Senor Rios, "if the Otomis cannot read them? We 
are going to have a newspaper in Otomi," he said, and the boys 
smiled slowly, as if they were not quite sure that this would be right. 
We sat in the booth, eating pink air-blown ices and talking of the 
school. 

"But there is one thing I should like to know," I said. "Do the 
Otomis who live across the road from the school, those whose huts 
are so near . . . Do they ever cross the road to ask your help in any- 
thing?" 

"No," he said slowly, and he seemed disturbed. "No, that is the 
trouble. We have chosen the pupils of the school from all the Otomi 
regions, the brightest and most ambitious ones we could find. We 
teach them the best methods of cultivation, we teach them Spanish, 
and try to make them part of our national life. But we must reach 
the people themselves, we must arouse their curiosity and their will 
to better themselves — the will broken by so many centuries of poverty 
and exploitation. They have left their mark. But first must come land 



THE STUPID OTOM1S 71 

— land of their own, and water. That is basic. And then, of course, 
better houses — houses in which they can stand upright; and a diet 
other than pulque, and the fight against malaria, and then . . ." 
He fell silent, looking past the busy plaza to the mountains. "There 
are no limits," he said, "no limits to the richness of life that we may 
forge for ourselves here in Mexico." He returned to his ices and then, 
as if abashed, he suddenly raised his voice, calling to a boy in the 
plaza. "Hey, you, Mario! That you fetch me some quinine in the 
pharmacy. I have malaria," he explained apologetically. "I was 
careless and forgot to take quinine on a trip up there in the mountains. 
It's bad because it breaks the faith of the pupils in medicine. It's a 
bad example," he added. 

He had started to tell me about the Otomi superstitions about 
malaria when a furious hornblowing sounded from the bus that was 
going back to Mexico City, and I had to rush to the Hotel Palacio 
to get my things. Don Jacinto, the proprietor, was still playing 
dominoes with his cronies in the patio. He rose to help me with my 
bags. 

"And did you see the town, senorita?" 
"Yes, I saw the town.** 

"Pues" — he shrugged — "there is not much to see here. Here 
there are not the beauties of Mexico, which so attract your country- 
men. But perhaps you will tell your countrymen about the Hotel 
Palacio?" 

I nodded, waiting for the bus which had disappeared on the other 
side of the plaza, and Don Jacinto continued with the firmness of 
one who must tell much in a short time. 

"As you see, senorita, we are unfortunate here. We live in the 
midst of these Otomis, who are savages incapable of civilization. 
They are so" — he raised his hand to indicate the height of a child — 
"of very small stature, dirty and stupid. And they do not even speak 
Spanish. Yet the Government tries to civilize them, at great expense 
and with a great waste of energy, which grieves me sufficiently. You 
must excuse me, senorita, for talking thus, but it has always pleased 
me to talk to Americans. Perhaps you will return, and then we can 
talk further?" 

"Oh, yes, I will return." 

"Ah . . . then you will see, you will see," he nodded. 
"Yes, then I will see," I said, with amiable postponement of the 
conclusion, which is the way to make conclusions in Mexico. 
And then the bus came and I was going back to the city. 

But I did not return to Ixmiquilpan as soon as I had planned, for 
when I came home there was a letter for me which determined the 
course of my life for the next four weeks. It came from the Depart- 
ment of Government, and the tenor of it was that they could not 



72 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

extend the time I might stay in Mexico. Not only that. They enter- 
tained the gravest suspicions concerning me, and I must call to see 
their Sefior X, in order to clarify what was now designated as 'the 
case'. So I went immediately to the Department of Government to 
see Sefior X, and found him very gentle and courteous, but rather 
terrifying, too. He had a dark beauty and soft reptilian eyes, and he 
could stare at one for minutes at a time, unblinkingly, in a way that 
was thoroughly disconcerting. 

"Senorita," he said, softly, "I am afraid that we suspect that you 
are a Polish refugee." 

I looked at him dazedly for a second, and then I heard myself 
denying it in that floundering, helpless way in which one denies the 
utterly impossible. 

"Nevertheless," Sefior X repeated, "we suspect that you are a 
Polish refugee without the legal permission to be here in Mexico." 

"I assure you," I said, but weakly and without conviction, "I am 
not a Polish refugee." 

"You deny it, senorita?" 

"I deny it." 

"You would say that you are not what we suspect you to be?" 

"I would say that I am not, sefior." 

He leaned back with half-closed eyes, and seemed to pass into 
deep thought. "I might tell you, senorita, that your status is perilous, 
for we shall be obliged to return you to Poland if our suspicions should 
be confirmed. However, if you could present strong evidence to the 
contrary . . ." He opened his eyes and looked directly at me. "Have 
you a birth certificate, senorita?" 

"Certainly, sefior." And I began to look feverishly in my purse, 
while he fixed me with his unblinking stare. I found everything else, 
but not the birth certificate. "It must be at home," I told him weakly. 
"I shall bring it this afternoon." 

"No need to rush yourself," Se or X relented in a kind of trea- 
cherous, feline way. "To-morrow will do. To-morrow I will be 
waiting for you," he added softly, and bowed me out. 

I was really disturbed, because I had tangled with Mexican 
bureaucracy before. It is not that they are martinets, insisting on a 
strict observance of all the forms. Quite the contrary. They delight 
in flouting the facts, they love to spin fantasies. They love rearranging 
reality, and they will insist that a thing is so (when it obviously is not), 
or not so (when it obviously is), with the sweet, gentle, and terrible 
insistence of the quietly insane. I remembered the time when I had 
entered Mexico. I was the only passenger on the bus, at night, from 
San Antonio to Laredo, and the driver and I talked, and he could not 
understand why I was going to Mexico. "Remember," he said, 
"Uncle Sam takes his protecting arm off your shoulder when you 
cross the border," 



THE STUPID OTOM1S 73 

It is not that Uncle Sam withdraws his protecting arm when you 
cross the border, for no one needs protection in Mexico. But what 
one loses in crossing the border is Uncle Sam's Anglo-Saxon calm and 
reasonableness. One enters an Alice-in-Wonderland world, a world 
of Latin logic — or Latin illogic, as one may prefer to call it. I found 
that out as soon as I reached the border. It was midnight, I was the 
only one crossing into Mexico, I had ten minutes to make the train, 
and the Mexican official at the bridge knew this. 

"What is this?" he asked, eyeing my tourist card, as though I had 
shown him some rare but dangerous insect. 

"It is my tourist card." 

"You claim to be an American citizen, sefiorita?" 

"I do not claim it. I have proved it to the satisfaction of the 
Mexican consul in New York, who gave me this card." 

He sighed and looked at the clock. The train was whistling im- 
patiently. "Unfortunately, sefiorita, consuls are not infallible. It is 
quite likely that he made a mistake." 

"But I showed him this, my birth certificate." And I laid the 
photostatic copy of it on his desk. 

"What is this?" he asked, peering at it, and then his eyes wandered 
to the clock with a sort of joyous leer, and back to me. "You really 
haven't much time, sefiorita. The train leaves in ten minutes." 

"I know that, and that's why I am telling you. I am an American 
citizen, and this is my birth certificate. It's a copy, and I paid a 
dollar and a half for it, and it's quite official, because — well, it's an 
official photostat. You know, they take a picture." And I went 
through the pantomime of someone snapping a picture, because I felt 
sure my English did not reach him. 

"Ah," he said, watching me approvingly. "It is a picture." 

"Yes, of my birth certificate." 

"It is the proof that you are an American citizen?" 

"Yes," I said, and then the train whistled piercingly and he looked 
at the clock and smiled. 

"You really haven't much time, sefiorita," he said reproachfully, 
and then he contemplated my birth certificate with a deadly, irritating 
calm. "Look," he pointed. "It says that you live at Brook Avenue, 
in New York." 

"No, I was only born there." 

"But it says you live there: Brook Avenue, New York." 

"It is the place where I was born." 

"But it says: Address, Brook Avenue, New York." 

"Yes, that was my address when I was born. I have moved 
many times since." 

"You do not live there now?" 

"No, I do not live there now. I have not lived there for a long 
time, One moves around after one is born." 



74 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

He crumpled a little at this, but soon rallied with a light of triumph 
in his eye. "Sefiorita," he sighed, shaking his head regretfully, "it is 
entirely possible that you are not an American citizen. After all, a 
document can be forged." 

"No," I told him patiently. "This birth certificate is not forged. 
It's a photostatic copy. You know, a picture." And I repeated my 
picture-taking pantomime, which he seemed to enjoy all over again. 
"And the United States Government," I added, "would have thought 
it sufficient to give me a passport on it." 

I should never have said that. "Then you have no passport, 
sefiorita?" 

"Yes, I did not get one." 

"They denied you a passport?" he asked softly. 

"I did not say that. I said that I did not get one, and I did not 
get one because I did not ask for one. Because they told me it was 
not necessary for entering Mexico." 

"Yes, it is not necessary for entering Mexico," he said, and then 
he looked at me meaningly. "For an American citizen, that is." 

We looked at each other with what I imagine must have been 
the rodent-like stare of two white mice caught in a psychologist's 
labyrinth. And then a great indifference overcame me. I did not care 
about entering Mexico any more. It was too difficult. I told the 
cab-driver who was taking my things across the border that it was no 
longer necessary, I had decided to stay in the United States. I told 
him to take the things back to the bus station, and I gathered up my 
birth certificate and began to walk away from the official desk. But 
the cab-driver had already been at the customs house with the baggage, 
and they had already gone through it and marked it 'Revisado', and 
we were all in a fine predicament. He began to talk very rapidly 
and sternly to the official, evidently telling him that the game had 
gone far enough, and the official called me back and apologized in 
his fashion. 

"You see, sefiorita, we must be careful. Granted that you were 
born an American citizen, there are still many ways by which you 
may have lost that status in the course of your life. For instance," 
he looked at me hopefully, "you may have married an alien?" 

"I did not marry an alien," I assured him. 

"Or you may have committed a crime for which you were sent 
to prison?" 

"That did not happen to me, either." 

"I am only supposing, sefiorita. It is my duty to suppose these 
things. However" ... He shrugged, then gathered himself for a 
solution. "Your case is dubious, very dubious," he said briskly, 
"but I think it can still be arranged. The question of a small deposit 
which you will leave here at the border ..." 

I asked him how much it was and he mentioned a fantastic sum. 



THE STUPID OTOMIS 75 

And then something happened. I became an American citizen, not 
only in fact, but in spirit. There descended on me that righteous 
indignation which is the characteristic of the American citizen when 
his right to go anywhere is questioned, when his lordship of the earth 
is challenged. I leaned over and banged the desk while I told him 
I would leave no deposit; I was not required to leave a deposit. I 
was an American citizen with all my papers in order, and I intended 
-to enter Mexico then and there, and make the train if he didn't mind 
— or had he another idea for getting me to Mexico City? But long 
before I finished, he had reached for his pen and official book, while 
he looked at me with a mixture of awe and admiration. 

"On my own responsibility, senorita," he said, writing in his 
book. "On my own responsibility I will permit you to pass." He 
sighed as though he expected dire consequences. 

We made the train just as it was pulling out, and the cab-driver 
threw my luggage on the platform and I hauled myself after it. "They 
are all after money," he had told me, as we careered toward the 
station. Possibly, I thought, but that could be only part of it. If I 
had bribed that official he would naturally have taken it. But I am 
sure he enjoyed the whole business. It was the official game of re- 
arranging reality. 

So, remembering this, I was worried about the Department of 
Government, and as soon as I got home I began to look for my birth 
certificate. But it was not to be found. It had disappeared in the 
course of my various movings, and therefore, according to the logic 
of the Department, I was a Polish refugee. But I did not want to be 
deported to Poland. I wanted to stay in Mexico. 

The Escotos, whom I took into my confidence, were deeply con- 
cerned. "Is it the police who want you to leave?" Mrs. Escoto asked 
me. 

"Yes, in a manner of speaking it is the police," I said, for to them 
the Government meant the police, and nothing else. 

"They are shameless ones," she said, shaking her head severely. 
"They always have things their own way." 

"They want money," Senor Escoto said with finality. 

But I quailed at the thought of bribing Senor X. Besides, it would 
be taken as my admission that I was a Polish refugee, and the status 
would be fixed on me for life. I talked it all over with some Mexican 
friends, and they were quite alarmed. "Cuidado !" they said. "Beware ! 
Beware of these officials." And then I asked them about getting a 
lawyer, and they were even more alarmed. "Cuidado!" they said. 
"Beware of lawyers!" So there was nothing to do but wait for the 
thing to run its course. But meanwhile my position was perilous. 
For I had overstayed my leave, through no fault of my own, and at 
any moment the Department might make another logical somersault 
and decide to fine or arrest me for it. The birth certificate that was 



76 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

coming from the States was delayed, and each day I went to Sefior X 
and told him it would surely come, and each day he fixed his hypnotic 
eyes on me and said he hoped so. 

Three weeks of this, and then something happened in the dark, 
mysterious departmental mind. I do not know what it was, but I 
received a letter saying they had decided that I was not a Polish 
refugee, after all. There was no evidence to support it, they said, 
and so they were pleased to withdraw their suspicions and they would 
henceforth accept the fact that I was an American citizen. But they 
saved face. In order to stay longer in Mexico, I must leave the country 
and re-enter. It would not inconvenience me, Sefior X assured me. 
A mere matter of taking the bus to Laredo, walking across the inter- 
national bridge, and then back again. 



11 



DO YOU KNOW THE HIGHWAY? 

I did not mind, for thus I would 'know the highway'. The Mexicans 
are very proud of the Pan-American highway that winds its 
miraculous length through the eastern sierra, and they ask every 
tourist, "Do you know the highway?" And if you do not, they advise 
rather sternly, "You must know it." It is a duty, part of your experi- 
ence of Mexico. And they are right. I have been over the highway 
four times now. I have gone in the rainy season, when the weird 
lunar mountain shapes were softened with green; and in the dry 
season when they burned with all the colours of the spectrum; and 
once when we drove through the whiteness of fog that would lift to 
show the world below us, new and startling as if this were the moment 
of creation. And each time it was new, breath-taking, and unbelievable. 
It is the nearest thing to flying without leaving the earth. And when 
the view unfolds, flowing in infinite mountain waves to the horizon, 
it is like witnessing that first flow and unfolding of the earth of which 
geologists tell us. 

To-day an American company runs an auxiliary bus service from 
Laredo to Mexico City; but at the time of my first trip there was no 
American bus, and one travelled Mexican. The Mayab bus was a 
huge antique affair equipped with shades that did not pull down, 
windows that did not open, and seats that did not spring back. There 
were gadgets for doing these things, but they did not work, which 
made it all very Mexican. For the Mexicans it is sufficient that they 
have a thing; whether it works or not is irrelevant. They point with 
pride to this or that modern device, and then they add with almost 



78 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

equal pride, "However, it doesn't function." And when things don't 
function they are not merely out of order (the nice American phrase 
which implies just a temporary failure). In Mexico things are 'des- 
compuesto' — that is, decomposed, disintegrated, fallen apart. I think 
they rather relish this strong word, so pleasantly discouraging to any 
effort at mending things. 

After a few struggles I found out that everything on the bus was 
decomposed. Even the General could not make anything work, but 
he used his efforts to assist me as an excuse to come and sit next to 
me. I had never travelled with a general before, and at first I was 
flustered. But then I remembered that generals are numerous in the 
Mexican army, and he turned out to be a very human, simple military 
man. He had fought in the Revolution and received his rank at that 
time, and before that he had been a plain, not too prosperous rancher. 
"My hands are made for work," he said, exhibiting them. "For work 
in the fields." 

The General knew the highway. He knew every inch of it, and 
he foretold every curve, every climb and descent, as if he had a map 
of it spread on his knees. But that wasn't enough. He loved the road 
so much that he felt called on to conduct the driving as though he 
were conducting music. "Watch, watch!" he would say, "now we 
ascend." And he lifted his hands slowly like an orchestra leader 
guiding a crescendo. Then, as the ascent ended, he flourished it away 
and his hands played a gentle pianissimo for the level stretch. He was 
never wrong in his timing, never wrong in his predictions. The two 
young chauffeurs (there are always two chauffeurs on a Mexican bus, 
one to drive and the other to talk to the driver and distract him) 
looked around at him in awe. "It's because I have driven over the 
highway so often," the General explained loudly to the whole bus. 
And he was careful to add that he always drove his own car, but this 
time his sister had brought him to the capital, and so he must go home 
by bus. 

I learned a great deal about the General. He was stationed in 
Monterrey, where he owned a beautiful home which seemed still to 
overwhelm him with its size and splendour. He was a widower, and 
he had mourned his wife for longer than the prescribed Catholic year, 
and he would not go to dances or hear music because of his mourning. 
He must have been very fond of his wife, for tears came; to his eyes 
when he spoke of her — the genuine tears of a sentimental old man. 
He did not think he would marry again, he was too old for that. 
"With what illusion can I marry again?" he asked, looking at me 
sadly. Besides, he had a young daughter ready for marriage, and he 
wanted to see her happily situated before he thought about himself. 
But in spite of all this, he assured me, he was not exactly a hermit.. 
When we came to Monterrey, if I conformed to the idea of stopping 
over, he would show me the town and his house and introduce me to 






DO YOU KNOW THE HIGHWAY? 79 

his daughter. Also, he would show me a picture of his wife. And when 
these formalities were over, we would have some time together. He 
put his hand on my knee at this point, and said: "I do this as a sign 
of my esteem and respect." "I hope so," I answered. 

But he was really good company, and I could not wish for a better 
travelling companion. He would not let me miss the least part of the 
trip. He knew all the legends connected with the highway — here was 
the stretch of smooth precipitous rock known as The Mirror; here the 
car of a gringa had gone hurtling over the rocks; here there was 
water, but stagnant and shallow, and of no use for irrigation. "If 
we were endowed with water like your country . . ." he said. He 
believed in Mexico for the Mexicans, in the right of every campesino 
to land, and that every labourer should share in the profits that came 
from the labour of his hands. He held up his hand again and turned 
his fist for display. "Isn't it just," he said earnestly, "if one's hands 
do the work?" And then he felt called on to apologize for his fervour. 
"These are not topics to discuss with a lady," he said, "but I under- 
stand that with you American women one may discuss anything, even 
politics." The General was active in politics. He would not tell me 
which presidential candidate he supported, but he was actively cam- 
paigning on the trip. At every stop there was someone who sought 
him out, and the General would speak to him rapidly, giving directions 
for calling meetings, for mustering forces, for propagandizing the 
unions and peasant groups. "We will see," he said grimly, "which 
it is: whether the eagle is devouring the serpent, or the serpent is 
devouring the eagle." 

Night came, and we drove through the blackness of the full 
sierra — a blackness that thickened in the steep wooded barrancas, 
where occasionally the lights shone from a lonely cluster of huts. The 
General could not forgive me that I had timed my trip so that this 
part of it fell to the night. "There was so much that I could have 
shown you if you had gone by day," he said illogically. "About 
Mexico." I understood what he meant on the return trip, when we 
went through the mountains by day. 

There is much one can learn about Mexico on the trip from Laredo 
to Mexico City. For it is one thing to be told that in Mexico man 
faces the two most implacable natural enemies — mountain and 
drought; and another thing to experience it — to ride hour after hour 
through the piling mountains, through the dry, merciless up-ended 
terrain, where there is not a handkerchief of level ground for miles. 
If corn is planted, it is planted on the steep grades, where one would 
feel dizzy to stand. And the lonely grass huts cluster perilously on the 
knife-edge ridges, or in the narrow clefts where the steep valley sides 
meet. There is not enough rain, even in the rainy season, to unparch 
the vast dry land; and as one goes north the rainfall is less and less. 

One cannot imagine that this land wants humanity, or that life 



80 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

on it could hold any gaiety or charm. It is mostly Otomi land and 
Otomi life at its most primitive. The Otomis walk along the road, 
laden with bags of carbon like the burros they drive, and they look 
at the cars with the uncomprehending stare of animals. The road is 
not for them. The story is that before it was built President Cardenas 
went to the Indians and told them that they would have a road, a 
splendid highway through the mountains. They thought that was all 
right, but after the highway came the Indians went to Cardenas. 
"We don't mind the road," they said, "but can't you do something 
about the cars that go over it?" The cars were killing their cattle. 
My General kept talking about the highway through the night, 
with the same enthusiasm he had shown by day. "Next time," he 
told me sternly, "you must leave Mexico City in the morning. Travel 
from Mexico City in the morning, from Laredo at night. However, 
since you are going to stay over in Monterrey ..." 

But I told him that I did not conform to the idea of staying over 
in Monterrey. 

"I cannot understand that," he said patiently. "What it is that 
you have against me. Haven't we spoken together with confidence?" 
Yes, I said, there had been plenty of confianza, that mystic Mexican 
quality which two people have together, or have not. 

"Then I cannot understand it," he said again. "What you have 
against me." He finally accepted my decision, but he was greatly 
saddened. 

But his gallantry did not desert him. "When you wish to sleep, 
sefiorita, just indicate it to me," he said, "and I will retire to the 
back of the bus." 

I was obliged to indicate it very soon, for I had already been 
dozing while he spoke. In the morning when I awoke he was sitting 
in the back of the bus, looking very wakeful and lonely. "You slept 
all through the night," he reproached me. "And I did not wake you, 
even when we crossed the Tropic of Cancer." 

At Monterrey he left us, walking down the street very erect and 
proud, with his hat jauntily on his head and his military coat on his 
arm because of the heat. Civilians greeted him with a kind of half- 
hearted military salute, and he responded in kind. After Monterrey 
the bus began to act queerly. It started to slow down and to limp as 
though stricken by paralysis. It went slower and slower, creaking pain- 
fully, and at last came to a full stop in front of a fly-blown little lunch- 
room in the desert that leads to Laredo. The driver turned to us and 
said gently: "We will pass some time here." And as we all piled out 
he explained further to me (I suppose because I looked puzzled): 
"Otherwise they will fine us. The road police will fine us." "They 
will think we have been speeding," said the other driver. "That is," 
said the first one, "if we do not lose time here. We will pass them 
ahead of schedule and they will think we have been speeding." 



DO YOU KNOW THE HIGHWAY? 81 

Of course they must have been speeding madly all night through 
the mountains, to be so much ahead of time. But nobody seemed to 
remember this. So we sat in the lunch-room for an hour, waving the 
flies away and fanning ourselves in the heat, and then the driver 
looked at his watch and gave a resounding "Vamonosl — Let's go!" 
and we all went back into the bus again. This time our pace was quite 
normal, and the road police nodded approvingly when we passed, 
and the two drivers smiled. They were called Pedro and Pancho, 
and they were very self-possessed young men, as I discovered on the 
trip back to Mexico City. 

Our bus, this time, was a little more antique than the first one, 
and a few miles out from Laredo some part of the motor started falling 
off, and each time that it fell off Pedro and Pancho looked at each 
other and said pleasantly: "It fell off again." One of the passengers 
thought he could fix the trouble with his toothbrush, and they let him 
try, but it did not help, and the part still kept falling off. It went on 
all through the night and well into the afternoon of the next day, 
and it got so that everyone waited for the falling-off act, and piled 
out docilely when it happened, to stretch and look at the scenery. 
Only the two Americans got discouraged, and went to sleep in the 
back of the bus. They had been taking pictures faithfully under the 
guidance of a young Mexican in a leather jacket, who knew the high- 
way almost as well as my General, and kept telling them when to 
have their cameras ready. But now they were sound asleep, and the 
Mexican felt worried. "Awake! Contemplate the beauties of the 
scenery!" he orated at them, every time the bus stopped. But the 
Americans slept on, very soundly. 

We were near Pachuca when the part fell off and could not be 
put back again, and we sat on the road wondering how we should 
get to Mexico City. There was no alarm, for it really never matters 
to a Mexican if he gets to a place on time or not; and Pedro and 
Pancho were the calmest of all. They kept saying: "Help will come." 
It came in the form of another bus of the same line, coming toward 
us from Mexico City. All the chauffeurs (there were now four) went 
into a huddle, and then Pedro and Pancho turned to us and said: 
"We will now all change buses." So a change was effected of all the 
passengers and all the luggage, and it was very tragic and heart- 
breaking, for the luggage got terribly mixed, and there were cries and 
confusion. Then there was some slight-of-hand with the motors, and 
the buses started again. Only we were now going to Mexico City in 
the bus that had just come from there ; and they were going to Laredo 
in the bus we had abandoned. 

I could not understand the reason for the change, and I asked 
Pedro about it when he came to the back seat to take a nap. "It is 
simple," he said, in that soft indifferent way in which Mexicans give 
explanations to fussing Americanos. "Our bus, as you know, was 



82 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

decomposed. But this one is even more decomposed, and there is 
some doubt that it would ever have reached Laredo, which is quite 
far away. So on the whole it was best to change, and take it back 
with us. We have divided the motor, but I think that just the same 
we will reach Mexico City." 

We did reach it, two hours late, but the greatest good feeling 
prevailed that we had reached it at all. And after that, whenever 
I would pass the bus terminal in the centre of town, Pedro and Pancho 
would hail me with a friendly leer, as comrades who had passed a 
pleasant time together. There were no hard feelings, even though 
we had had a misunderstanding of the kind that is very likely to occur 
between the Latin male and the Anglo-Saxon female, I had not 
followed Senor X's advice to cross the bridge and return by the next 
bus, but decided instead to stay overnight on the Mexican side and 
make my formal re-entry the next day. Pedro and Pancho said they 
knew of a hotel where I could stay. In fact it was the hotel where the 
bus stayed also (in the courtyard) and they would drive me right to 
it, luggage and all. 

On the way I discovered that Pedro and Pancho stayed at the 
hotel too. We drove to the Serapio Rendon, and they carried my 
luggage to the desk, and signalled me to make myself ignorant of 
Spanish, and they bargained with the stout proprietor and got me an 
excellent room for no more than the ordinary price. "I have but one 
regret about this room," Pancho said ceremoniously, as he put my 
things in it. "I regret that it is so far from mine." It was so delicately 
put that I could not register the indignation that was in order; but 
I told them, while I drew forth the tip, that there seemed to have 
been some misunderstanding. "Then you don't intend to be my girl 
for to-night?" Pancho asked bewilderedly, while Pedro eyed me 
reproachfully. No, I did not. And I tipped them lavishly to reinforce 
the point. They refused the tips loftily and went away deeply hurt. 

I am sure they could not understand the Americana. Most 
Mexicans have an idea that all American women, because they are 
free to lead their own lives, are also sexually free; and perhaps those 
American women who have gone down to Mexico to shed their 
inhibitions and find romance have aided and abetted this idea. But 
it is certain that an American woman has to fight for her freedom 
all over again in Mexico; for Mexican women still live in the nine- 
teenth century, sheltered and domesticated, ruled entirely by the 
males of the household. I thought of this as I sat outside the Hotel 
Rendon, looking across the Rio Grande to Texas, and waiting for it 
to be time to take the bus again. I had crossed the bridge and been 
in the United States. I had eaten salads and green vegetables in a 
cafeteria where I could put my elbows on the clean white table. I 
had walked through Laredo and seen comfortable frame houses and 
home-like Protestant churches, and it had all been so clean and quiet 



BITTER BREAD 83 

and orderly and prosperous. I felt very homesick and I wondered if 
I really wanted to go back to Mexico. And then I knew that if I 
did not, I should be homesick instead for Mexico, though it is not clean, 
not orderly and not prosperous. It is difficult or too long to say why 
this is so, but it is so. The Mexicans say that anyone who has- ever 
been in their country can never forget it, and I am one to believe 
this. 

Pancho came out from the hotel. "Shall I take your things to 
the bus, senorita?" he asked with soft courtesy. I said yes, and turned 
my back on the States and walked toward the bus. 



12 



BITTER BREAD 

Ofelia had studied harder since Manrique's visit, and now she 
could spell out the headlines in the morning paper. One 
morning she shook her head disapprovingly. "Well, it is just 
as my father said. The millers are going on strike." I read where 
she pointed: another strike of the corn mills. 

"We shall be without tortillas," she said, concerned. 

"Then we shall eat bread." 

"I cannot eat bread, senora, it makes me feel quite ill." 

"But you've been eating it all the time!" 

"I have felt ill all the time." 

The strike began the next day, and there was no more making of 
tortillas, for there was no corn dough to be had in all the city. And 
without the slap-slap sound of tortilla-making, a great silence seemed 
to have fallen on the streets, and on the huts in the lot too. 

The women stood in groups discussing the calamity. The mills 
had stopped working, the wonderful mills that ground the corn in 
no time, so that one could go to the tortillerias and buy the dough all 
prepared, great golden masses of it. Now they would have to grind 
the corn themselves, kneeling down at the low stone metate ; and grind 
and grind all day, the immemorial servitude of Mexican women. 

But Ofelia's mother decided to buy a machine for grinding the 
corn. That is, if I would advance Ofelia's salary. She had ten pesos 
put away, and with ten more she could buy a meat-grinder such as 
the butcher used. Did I think it was a good idea? 

I thought it was, and ordered the machine in town, and it came 
a few days later. Ofelia called me down to witness the unveiling. 
Senor Escoto squatted on the floor, smilingly aloof from this woman's, 
affair. He would not bother with the machine, but the young aunt 




jfc"w 



BITTERBREAD 85 

put the parts together as deftly as any man, and all the women from 
the huts came to gaze at it admiringly, and to try turning the handle, 
which moved with wonderful ease. "If only Daniel could see it," 
Mrs. Escoto sighed. His sweetheart stood in the doorway and looked 
down the empty sunlit street. "Yes . . . Daniel ..." she said 
sadly. 

But the machine did not work. The grains of corn stuck in it, 
strong as pebbles, and then no one could turn the handle. And a 
few days later Ofelia reported sorrowfully: "We have thrown it 
away, senora. My father says it is no use, we must give up the hope 
of eating tortillas until the strike is over." 

So she had spent her pesos for nothing, and she worked silently, 
looking very unhappy. 

"Never mind," I told her. "You will make it up quickly. There 
are so many extra errands to do." 

She nodded. "It is not the money, senora. It is Daniel. He has 
disappeared." 

My heart sank, because there had been another robbery in the 
house, this time at the licenciado's. 

"But where has he gone?" 

"Pues, that is what we do not know," she said reasonably. "We 
have looked for him all over. My father went to the village where 
his godfather lives, but no one there has seen him. Nor has he been 
to the church, nor even to the building where he watches at night. Not 
one of the peons has news of him." 

"And his sweetheart?" 

"She weeps, weeps, weeps for him all day." 

"Well, he will be back soon. He is young, and it's the most 
natural thing for a young man to tire of his work and go away for a 
while." 

"Senora, he is sixteen. And his sweetheart is anxious for the 
wedding." 

That night I went down to the Germans to go with Ernst to the 
orchestra. But there was no sound of his viola, and when I came in 
I saw that he had not gathered his music or folded the music stand. 
He sat at the table, his hands covering his face. 

"Well, to-night they will play without me," he said heavily, 
without even the resonance of anger in his voice. 

Lutzie signalled to me that he was aufgeregt. 

"But we can't," I said. "Not the Fiorelle quintet." 

"Ach, the Fiorelle quintet! It was a stupidity to start it, anyway. 
We are not musicians enough for it. Not those others." 

"But it's not that," Lutzie told me, and then she lowered her 
voice. "Didn't you see it?" 

"How could- she have seen it?" Ernst asked irritably. "I tore it 
out right away." 



86 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

"You didn't see it on the mail-box?" 

But before I could answer Ernst looked up. His face was haggard. 
"It is just like in Germany," he said, with a listless chant. "Just like 
in Germany. We shall have to change our name and move from 
here." 

"Sh — Ernst! It is not like in Germany." 

"Only small, small." Suddenly he clenched his fists and trembled 
with an anger to which all his previous rages had been as nothing. 
"I tell you we must fight it!" he shouted. "We must fight it here, 
while it is still small." 

"Ernst — please!" And then she told me, giving the news help- 
lessly as if in surrender. "This morning we found the word Jew 
written on our letter-box downstairs. Foul Jew. Ernst says the 
licenciado wrote it." 

"It was his handwriting." 

"Child, you didn't talk to anyone? You didn't tell anyone we 
are Jewish?" 

"No — no one." 

"There, Ernst, you see? You must forgive us, fraulein, we are 
very much afraid." 

I put my violin down. The music of Schubert's Fiorelle quintet 
hummed through my mind, but far away and irrelevant, a harmony 
that would never again be recovered on this earth. Lutzie went for 
coffee, and Ernst, quiet now, sat drumming his fingers on the table. 

"You practised that first movement too much," he said severely. 
But he looked away from me, embarrassed. "Do you expect to be a 
soloist, perhaps? I have told you, play the music through. In an 
orchestra you want rhythm. Rhythm, fraulein!" 

"Well, we will have coffee." Lutzie set the cups down briskly, 
and began to praise the good coffee that she bought from another 
German refugee, who peddled it from door to door. And then, as 
always, the talk turned to the latest robbery. 

"I tell you, it was not a genuine robbery," Lutzie said. "That 
licenciado is not in order. He did it himself because he needs the 
money." 

I made a movement of dissent, but she went on: "Child, why 
are you so innocent? Manolo knows. He says the licenciado has 
not been able to pay his bills — and have you ever known him to work? 
And that wife of his with her jewels! No, child, those jewels were 
not stolen. They are hidden away, and the licenciado is lying." 

But at least slae did not blame Daniel. "Daniel has disappeared," 
I said. 

"Of course," she agreed calmly, "Because of all the previous 
robberies. Do you believe me now? I told you the Escotos were 
not in order. You will see, Herr Escoto will also disappear." 

Ernst was listening preoccupied. "It is just like in Germany, 



BITTER BREAD 87 

all over again. Here, too, we are Jews and must hide. Child!" He 
put his finger to his lips and peered at me through his glasses. "You 
must keep our secret, no? You must not tell anyone — not a soul— 
that we are Jews and selling our chocolate without permission. 
Because if it becomes known. . . ." 

"It is bitter bread," Lutzie sighed. "Bitter bread." 
So my little paradise collapsed, and as I went upstairs I felt as if 
the house were enmeshed in invisible wires, the cross-currents of hate 
and suspicion, the war of all against all. 

To beguile Ofelia, who was worried about Daniel's disappearance, 
we went to the Santa Julia market to buy her an apron. Santa Julia 
is a slum where the old adobe houses are built around corrals noisy 
with chickens and pigs and goats, and the unpaved streets are covered 
with a fine mixture of mud and refuse and human excrement. But 
the way there is pleasant enough. We walked on the embankment of 
the canal, with the fields on our left stretching away toward the 
mountains, and the level white city below us. The day was clear, 
and in the east the snow-topped volcanoes flashed like white lightning 
in the sky. 

The Santa Julia market is as poor as the Merced, but less crowded, 
and so the acrobats come there more often. There is usually a painted 
clown, hideous and sad; and a fire-eater, and a little girl in pink 
tights, and a little boy who beats the drum. The clown holds out his 
hat and moves around through the crowd, shocking the women with 
whispered obscenities. The little girl in pink tights raises a ladder 
in the air, balances herself a moment, and falls off. She is dirty and 
bedraggled, painted like a prostitute. The fire-eater juggles his 
flaming torch and puts the burning end in his mouth. And all the 
time the drum beats, a mournful, ugly pounding insistent as death, 
while the Mexicans look on, intent and joyless. Only the flame- 
swallower gets a laugh. When he cannot blow out his torch he puts 
it between his legs, makes a movement as if passing wind, and the 
torch goes out. Then it is over, a few pennies are tossed into the ring, 
and the acrobats troop sadly away. Then there are the little dressed-up 
dogs who perform badly or not at all, and the hypnotists and the 
jugglers, and the contortionists and the singing beggars — all the sad 
perpetual carnival of the market-place. 

We were looking at the aprons when the sound of the drum 
started, and Ofelia quickly made her choice, and we rushed over 
piles of percale and calico and potteries to the centre of the market. 
This time it was a hypnotist. His face was really frightening, eaten 
with leprosy or syphilis and scarred with smallpox. But he smiled 
a very white toothsome smile, and spoke softly to the boy he was 
hypnotizing. "Don't be afraid, nothing can happen. Don't be 
afraid. . . ." The boy was holding a little carved box in his hand. 



88 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

He was staring at the man and he looked scared to death. "Now 
put the box down, put the box down. Don't be afraid, nothing can 
happen. . . ." And he smiled frighteningly and made passes in the 
air with long white hands. But the boy could not put the box down. 
He lifted it over his head, waved it around, tried to drop it; but his 
fingers were paralysed and would not relinquish their hold. His 
face turned pale and he fell to the street, still holding the box. "Don't 
be afraid," the man said softly, "don't be afraid." 

Ofelia tugged at my arm. "Gome away," she whispered. "Please 
come away, sefiora. The Devil is in the box." 

"Nonsense! The boy is just scared." 

"Please " She tugged at my arm. "Please come away." 

She was as pale as the little boy and her teeth were chattering. 

"Now, Ofelia, you know that boy was only frightened!" But 
she could not even listen to me until we were far away, beyond the 
sound of the drum. 

We were leaving the market when I met Martina. I knew her- 
from the boarding-house where I had stayed. She had been a maid 
there, but she left to go and live with her handsome sweetheart, Pepe, 
who was a chauffeur. 

"And how is Pepe?" I asked. 

Martina lowered her voice. "Didn't I tell you about Pepe? 
Well, he is in jail. He ran over a general's daughter. Nothing 
happened to her, but since she was a general's daughter poor Pepe 
had to go to jail. Ay, sefiora, que tristeza ! He will have to stay there 
three years unless we can buy him out. Already he has given 
them two hundred pesos, but they want more. Ay, sefiora, all our 
savings!" 

It made me think about Daniel. If he was in jail, perhaps some- 
thing could be done for him with money. I had heard that in Mexico 
anything can be done with money, and I was inclined to believe it 
since this is true of so many other countries. But of course I was 
not at all sure that Daniel was in jail; and yet, as we walked home and 
I mulled the facts, I became more and more convinced of it. Ofelia 
roused me as we turned away from the canal. "There's my mother." 
I saw Mrs. Escoto's tall figure ahead of us. It was unusual for her to 
venture far from the hut, except to go to the church. "She went to 
pray for Daniel's return, but my father says that prayers will not 
help." I weighed this added evidence. Was Sefior Escoto a sceptic 
who did not believe in prayer? Or did he know that Daniel was in 
jail; and against this overpowering fact, this hard civic reality — did 
he feel that prayer was useless ? He might feel that disease and death, 
fire and famine, might be averted by prayer. But jail! Now that 
was something different! That needed money, and not prayers. 
And by the time we reached home I had convinced myself that 
Daniel was in jail, and I decided to have it out with Ofelia. 



JUCHITAN WEDDING 89 

So I asked her: "Have you, too, gone to church to pray for 
Daniel's return?" 

"Sefiora, I went on my knees to the Virgin, and placed two candles 
before her. But now — since my father says praying will not help. . ..." 

"And you, Ofelia, what do you make of it? 5 ' 

"Pues. ..." She was in deep uncertainty, for the prayers and 
candles had never failed her before. Then she sighed. "My father 
is always right." 

"And where does he think Daniel is?" 

"He doesn't know, he has gone to look for him. Sefiora " She 

looked at me sideways with fear in her eyes. "I want to ask you 
something. You think Daniel committed the robbery at the 
licenciado's ! You think that he's in jail!" 

"Oh, no. . . ." 

""But they are all saying that. All the big mouths on the lot. 
And you think so too, sefiora?" 

"tdon't know," I said slowly. "And even if he were. . . . Often 
one does things without thinking, that one regrets later." 

"Yes," she agreed angrily. "Only that did not happen to Daniel. 
Certainly that was not the case with Daniel." 

"Then what did happen?" 

"Ah ... if we only knew. It is precisely this that we do not 
know. But now my father is gone too. He has gone to find Daniel, 
and we have not seen him for two days." 

Lose one thing and it will find something else you have lost, I 
thought— while Ofelia looked at me, angry and disappointed. So 
we did not part very well that night, and I knew less and less. 



13 



JUCHITAN wedding 

But I forgot about the Escotos and their troubles when Alpha's 
letter came. I had met her in a little book-store on the Avenue 
Hidalgo. Serior Garcia who kept the store was small, bald, 
and toothless, but for all that a great student of women. Usually 
after I had bought the books he recommended (and he was far more 
useful than all the catalogues in Mexico's disorganized libraries), he 
would offer me a cigarette and we would smoke while he discussed 
the question of feminine charm. He found American women very 
pretty, but basically unattractive. "They walk badly," he said, "and 
their voices are shrill and they lack repose. But take the women of 
my tierra. I think they have caught something of the palm trees in 



JUGHITAN WEDDING 91 

their bearing, and when they walk it is like the movement of the wind 
through the palms. Wait," he urged me once, "I will introduce you 
to a woman of my tierra." 

Alpha came in later, and I found her beautiful. Her face is like 
a primitive mask, full of austere power. And she walks superbly. 
When she was a little girl in her native Juchitan she went to market 
barefoot and carrying a basket of fruit on her head. Then she wore 
the loose flowing garments of her village, but now even the short ugly 
city dress could not disguise the rhythm and grace of her walk. She 
walks with head and back very erect, all the movement in her hips 
and thighs; and it is something to watch, like a dance. She had 
come to Mexico City to study nursing, and soon after I met her she 
returned to her village, to fight against the appalling mortality from 
childbirth, against malaria and dysentery and the mysterious pinto 
that turns the skin blue. 

She wrote me to come to Juchitan. She said now was the time to 
come because the north wind was blowing, cooling the tropics, and 
besides there would be a wedding in the village which I might want 
to see. So I bought quinine and a woven bag to hold my things, and 
consigned myself to the ordeal of travel on a second-class train. 
Juchitan is a little town on the tropical isthmus of Tehuantepec, where 
Mexico narrows between the two oceans. In space it is not far from 
the capital, but in time a slow fifty-two-hour ride on the narrow-gauge 
National Railway, through heat and jungle. Alpha met me at the 
station. She wore the colourful costume of her village — the full 
flowered skirt and the loose sleeveless blouse, bright red and yellow, 
which bears the Indian name huipil. She said the Government doctor 
had come, and she would have to go to the health station to change 
into her uniform. But her cousin was there to drive me to the 
house. 

"You are from over there?" he asked shyly, when the car was in 
motion. It was an old Ford, one of the three cars in Juchitan. 

"From New York," I specified, for 'over there' means, vaguely, 
the United States. 

"I understand it is very cold there. I could not live there because 
of the cold." 

"That is only in the winter." 

"Yes, that's just it. The question of winter. We are in winter 
now, and I find it too cold. This north wind, it will blow for months." 

It blew relentlessly, herding all the dust of the isthmus before it. 
But save for the dust the weather was like the May of a Northern 
poet, like the exalted blue days of wind and brilliant sky that come in 
the spring after a rain. In the North such days are rare and must be 
plucked at once. But here there was promise of months of them, a 
miracle like the month of Sundays. 

"If course in the capital it is often much colder," Alpha's cousin 



92 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

continued. "I am studying in the capital." He was very proud. 
"But here I spend the vacation." 

Vacation meant to me tennis flannels and sports, and I asked him 
what there was to do. 

"Do?" he shrugged without understanding. "Nothing. I pass 
the time tranquilly." 

We turned off the road and we were in Juchitan. Mexican towns 
and villages have a way of impressing themselves in sharp visual 
images that remain vividly in the memory like an inner painting, the 
essential line and colour of a place. Thus Monterrey is a wide avenue 
white with sun, and a dark soaring monument against the hot purple 
sierra. Taxco is a climb of red- tiled roofs over a hill and the red 
tiles of the Cathedral dome flashing in the sun. Of Juchitan I remem- 
ber the flatness and squareness of white adobe houses, the severe 
line of a white wall joining the sky; and nothing to break the sweep 
of sky but a solitary palm, lifting shaggy fronds on a curving trunk. 
And always the wind driving veils of dust through the unpaved streets, 
and the women walking in the wind and the dust, their skirts blowing. 

Alpha's aunts came out to welcome me. In the big white-walled 
living-room they brought atole to drink, and water in an earthen 
jar, talking among themselves in Zapotecan but with Spanish for me. 
They spread a fresh sheet on the bed, and then, shyly smiling, they 
withdrew and left me alone to sleep. When I awoke, a little girl 
was standing in the doorway and staring at me. She fled when I 
moved, leaving the door ajar, and I looked out at the shaded back 
portico with its two massive Spanish pillars framing the stone-paved 
patio. The women were working, carrying gourds with water across 
the patio — a slow stately parade as if they had all eternity for doing 
things, and time did not matter. Nor does time matter in Juchitan. 
It may be because of the wind eternally blowing, making a vast 
monotony of sound out of day and night, so that one does not notice 
the treacherous hours slipping away; or perhaps it's because all the 
things that make time are lacking. Where there are factory whistles, 
crowds, trains, real estate developments, spring millinery sales and 
winter clothes to put away, one must live with an eye on the clock 
and the calendar. But in Juchitan there is only the wind and the 
dust, rumbling ox-carts and a sleepy river, the ancient pageantry of 
the market-place, days eternally the same. 

I watched the slow motion of the women until I dozed off again, 
and when I awoke the door was closed and the room dark. It was 
the main living-room of the house, but in complete disorder. Carved 
chests and bolts of cloth and pottery piled helter-skelter, a confusion 
of furniture from which one picked out an altar with a figure of the 
Virgin, a dressing-table laden with Pond's cold cream and powder, 
a sewing machine. Two hammocks strung across the width of the 
room cleared the disorder like boats over the waves. They were for 



JUCHITAN WEDDING 93 

sleeping in the hot weather, but no one had thought to remove them 
now that they were not needed. But perhaps this confusion, too, 
reflected the Juchitan idea. For order represents our fear and ner- 
vousness. We create ordered interiors as a protest over the passing 
of things, to define our mortal lives against the void of time. Yet 
where no one is worried about time and mortality, why bother with 
ordered interiors? 

The door opened and Alpha's Aunt Electra came in. I had 
noticed her before because, unlike the other women, she had green 
eyes, and except for her dark skin she looked so much like an aunt of 
mine that I had trouble not to call her by that aunt's name. She had 
changed her e very-day red and yellow huipil for one splendidly 
embroidered in black and gold, and instead of her plain black skit 
she wore a red embroidered one, with the ceremonial white pleated 
ruffle at the bottom. In the morning she had gone barefoot, but now 
she put on high-heeled shoes. Then, seated at the dressing-table, she 
began to smear her face with the Pond's cold cream, as expertly as 
any debutante who has endorsed the product. "For the dust," she 
said. "Don't you want some?" She seemed puzzled when I said no. 

"But you are coming with us?" 

She told me about the wedding in the village. There would be 
four dances, all out-of-doors, the first at the home of the bride's 
godmother. Already the men had gone to help build the canopy of 
branches for the dance, and the women were making ready for a visit 
to the godmother. The girl who was getting married belonged to the 
well-to-do class, and the wedding festivities would absorb all the village, 
at least all the families that lived in the stone and adobe houses, but 
not those that lived in the grass huts near the river. These are the 
poor of Juchitan. They might trail the wedding procession through 
the streets, and stand looking in on the dances, but they could not be 
counted as wedding guests. 

"Yes, of course I am coming," I said, and Electra nodded, pleased, 
and gave me a handkerchief with eggs tied in it. All the women 
carried eggs tied in a handkerchief, and we went out together into the 
dusty street. 

In the godmother's house the women who had come before us 
sat against the wall, a fresco of bright huipils, flowing skirts sculptured 
at the bottom with stiff white ruffles, dark faces framed in wreathed 
braids. The godmother was old as an ancient deity. She sat on the 
floor sifting flour. There was a metate for grinding corn, and each 
woman in turn rose and knelt at the metate and ground some of the 
corn grains. From outside where the men were building the canopy 
came bursts of laughter. First the voice of one man speaking, and 
then the ribald burst of laughter. But the women worked in grave 
silence, as if the event they were preparing were not a marriage but 
had to do with death. Each guest on entering gave eggs to the god* 



94 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

mother, and dropped a coin into a gourd on the floor. I had no 
change and put in a peso. The old woman looked at it, consulted in 
Zapotecan with another old woman, and then carefully counted out 
nine coins from the gourd. She was making change of the peso and 
she brought it to me and said gravely: "Each one gives only ten 
centavos." And I could not tell whether I was being rebuked for 
vainglorious display, or because I had broken the custom. Then we 
had sweet biscuits and atole flavoured with cinnamon and chocolate, 
and everyone received a cigarette wrapped in paper. Not to be wrong 
again, I put mine behind my ear when I saw all the other women 
doing that. 

After a while Electra looked at me. "Do we go?" she asked. 

"As you wish." 

"We go, then?" 

"When you are ready." 

But she rose and I followed her out, and we walked toward the 
plaza while I wondered if I had committed a breach of etiquette in 
leaving so soon. But at any rate I still had my cigarette behind my 
ear, as Electra had hers, and I would not touch it until she touched hers. 

"Our life is very different from yours," Electra said, courteously 
making conversation. 

"Different, but more interesting." 

"Ah, you think so?" Her green eyes were opaquely polite. "I 
think you must laugh at us here." 

"No, I am sorry if you think so." 

She was silent, walking supplely in her high-heeled shoes. I 
had thought she was tall, but walking beside her I found I was the 
taller. It is the flowing dress and splendid walk of the Jachitan 
women that gives an illusion of tallness. 

"I have been to the capital," Electra said. "There it is very 
different from here. They laughed at me there. I went dressed just 
as I do here, and the boys ran after me on the street and called: 
'Hungarian!' Is it true that the Hungarians dress as we do?" 

"There is great similarity." 

"Then they, too, are of Tehuantepec ?" 

"No, they are of Europe." 

"How rare," she mused, "that they are not of Tehuantepec and 
should dress the same. Still, I did not like being laughed at. The 
capital is very wonderful, but I could not live there. They laugh at 
us and they do not speak Zapotecan." 

"But you speak Spanish too." 

"Apenas," she said. "Hardly. I believe you speak more of 
Spanish than I do." 

"Oh, no." 

"Certainly. We are taught Spanish in school, but Zapotecan is 
our language." 



JUCHITAN WEDDING 95 

"But you see how useful Spanish is, for we can understand each 
other." 

"Really?" Her eyes gave no hint of mockery, but I was not 
sure. "Over there" — she pointed across an empty lot that looked as 
though it were in the slow process of being turned into a playground — 
"is the church." 

It stood behind a rusted iron gate, a very plain mediaeval-looking 
mass of stone, bespeaking the earliest period of the Spanish church- 
builders. Perhaps the work of the Franciscan friars, who did not 
have much time for building churches while they converted Indian 
souls by the thousands. 

"It is always kept closed," Electra said rather sadly, "and there is 
no priest. But to-morrow one is coming from Tehuantepec to marry 
the betrothed couple. That will be done in the chapel, which is 
always kept closed too, but to-morrow the priest will open it." 

We came to the plaza and sat down near the bust of Juarez. 
There are two statues that haunt Mexico. One is the statue of 
Cuatemoc, the Aztec prince who defied the Spaniards. He stands 
on the Re forma in his Indian mantle and plumed headdress, with 
his long spear raised for hurling; and replicas of him are likely to 
appear anywhere. The other is the statue of Juarez, an Indian too, 
and the great national hero of modern Mexico. Cuatemoc crops 
up all over in little souvenir copies, much like our Statue of Liberty. 
Juarez has the plazas. This one happened to be a very bad machine- 
made bust. I had expected something better, for Juarez was of the 
same blood as the people of Juchitan. The plaza was deserted, 
flecked with sun and shade on the white benches and on the bandstand 
in the centre. 

"There is never any music," Electra said, continuing her sad 
record of things abandoned. But it was only Spain that was aban- 
doned — the closed church, the disused plaza. The life of Juchitan 
is still Indian, and the marriage of the bridal pair in the chapel would 
be the merest incident in the long pagan wedding ceremonies, cere- 
monies so old that they meaning is forgotten, or only told obscurely 
on the lips of some ancient of the village. 

"Are you anxious to see the bride?" Electra asked. 

"I am very curious." 

"To me she is not pretty," Electra said disdainfully. "But she is 
marrying very well. Her husband is rich and they will go to live in 
the capital, where he teaches. I would not like that, living in the 
capital." 

"But if your husband wished it?" 

"Pues ... I have no husband." 

"But when you have one. ..." 

She was silent a moment. "I do not think I will ever have one." 

"But you are young and pretty." 



96 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

"Oh, no, I am old. The question is over for me." 

'I think you will marry very soon." 

"No, I think it will not be." 

She shook her head and I wondered what had happened to her. 
Perhaps she was disappointed in love, or perhaps there had never 
been a mate for her in Juchitan. They say that the women of 
Juchitan outnumber the men. Or it may have been some strangeness 
in herself, something for a psychiatrist to unravel. For there is no 
climate in the world where the human heart will not go awry. But 
whatever it was, she had become one of that sad sisterhood scattered 
over the world — a maiden aunt. Poor Electra! The Mexicans say 
of a spinster that 'she stayed to dress the saints'. But there the church 
was closed, and there were not even the pale waxen figures of the saints 
to dress. She was looking out over the plaza, where the wind whirled 
dust around the forsaken bandstand. 

"It is sad here," she said, "I do not know what it is, but sometimes 
I feel a great sadness." 

When we returned to the house, Alpha was there with Andres, 
her sweetheart, and Ghavo ; and we sat down to a meal of turtles' 
eggs and goat* meat, served by Electra. All the women but Alpha 
ate in the big smoky barn in back of the patio. 

I had met Andres in Mexico City, and from the first he had treated 
me with affable mockery. . 

"She comes from the United States," he said, introducing me to 
Ghavo. "A country strong but stupid." 

"I have been to your country," Ghavo said in English. "I have 
been there before I have come to Mexico. I have learned English 
there." 

"She comes from New York," Andres said. "They do not speak 
much English there." 

"I have been in New York," Ghavo continued. "It is wonderful. 
So many skycrappers." 

"She does not understand you." 
• "And I have learned a song of your country — c O Columbia the 
Gin of the Ocean'." 

"Gem," I said. 

"Gin," he insisted. "That is how I have learned it." They both 
sang it with their hands to their hearts. 

Ghavo was a refugee from Spain. His wife and child were still 
in a concentration camp in France and he had not heard from them 
for many months. He took out a picture and showed it to me. "I 
have never seen the boy," he said, "because he was born after I came 
to Mexico. But he looks like me, doesn't he? All he needs is the 
moustache." 

Andres, too, had fought in Spain, and the talk of the Spanish civil 



JUGHITAN WEDDING 97 

war continued late into the afternoon, the distant clamour of arms 
through the wind of Juchitan. Then we heard the first imperious 
notes of the marimba, carried on the wind. The wedding dance had 
begun. 

Strictly speaking, there were not four wedding dances, but rather 
a continuous state of dancing, a sort of common village responsibility 
not to let the dance die down. So that people went home to sleep 
only for a few hours, and then were up again to take over from those 
who had not yet slept. And day and night the women put on their 
best huipils and long ruffled skirts, and their ornaments of shining 
Yankee coins; and day and night the wind carried the sound of the 
marimba tirelessly beating out slow Cuban danzones, until it seemed 
like the sound of the wind itself. 

The first dance began with staid formalities. The women sat 
with downcast eyes, their aloof modesty belying the provocation- of 
their bright huipils and tinkling gold ornaments. The men stood 
apart, talking, with only an occasional glance for the women. Night 
had come, and the flaring torches threw a painted green light on the 
leafy canopy and bronze shadows on the faces of the marimba players, 
studiously beating the instrument in a corner. "One dances only 
with those one knows," Alpha said. She had twined red ribbons 
in her hair, and her ear-rings gleamed under the dark braids. All 
the women, even the wrinkled old ones who had come only to gossip, 
were resplendent in their native dress. But the dressing-up of the 
men had brought them to a sad drabness. They looked awkward 
in their city clothes, not mated to the pagan splendour of the women. 
Andres and Alpha were the first to dance, a languorous two-step ; and 
as each couple joined, the young bloods gathered outside raised a 
derisive shout. Unseen but heard, like ribald birds haunting the 
canopy, they improvised couplets about the .dancers. Everyone 
stopped dancing and listened when the couplet promised to be 
especially spicy. There was a couplet for Ghavo and me, of which 
I caught only the word gringa, for the rest was in Zapotecan. And 
Andres would not translate or tell me why everyone had laughed. 

Later came the Sandunga. It is the dance of the isthmus, and it 
began with a stir of expectancy, a flourish on the marimba, and the 
word 'Sandunga' like a warning and a call from mouth to mouth. 
First the women danced alone, a quiet polka step, demurely holding 
their skirts. The men joined slowly, shuffling around their partners, 
with their hands behind their backs. Save for the unvarying step, 
the holding of the skirts, and the posture of the men, the figures are 
informal and the dancers move freely as they will, self-absorbed, 
though always orientated toward their partners. Courtship and 
indifference, pursuit and retreat, chastely stylized; while only the 
anguished cry, 'Ay, Sandunga! 5 carries the inner tension. 

Chavo and I did not dance the Sandunga, for without the mood 



93 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

of inner absorption, which is not to be learned, one cannot dance it. 
We sat watching and listening to the eloquent comments of Andres's 
uncle. An old fellow with a melancholy Indian face, he had attached 
himself to us like a one-man Chamber of Commerce, to see that we 
stayed in a constant glow of appreciation. "The things of Juchitan!" 
he cried, beating his breast with one hand while a gesture of the 
other encompassed the dancers. "The things that are very much 
ours ! Observe, O strangers, the quaint customs of my people. Go 
forth and publish them to the world." Later, when the Sandunga 
was over and everyone went out to take refreshments under the sky 
where the stars seem so strangely low, he cornered us and began to 
talk about Juarez, whom he called 'the exquisite Indian'. 

"I see him in the hills of Oaxaca, a simple shepherd lad feeding 
his flock, unaware of the great destiny that awaits him." The narra- 
tive lengthened, the gestures grew more dramatic, and people gathered 
around him. 

We danced that night until the wind of morning began, and then, 
after a few hours' sleep haunted by the sound of the marimba, we 
followed the wedding procession through the wind and the dust to 
the ancient chapel where the priest who had come from Tehuantepec 
performed the marriage rite. And we danced all of that day and 
again the next morning, when all the women came with coloured 
pinwheels and loaves of corn bread that they gave to the bride. But 
at night the bride and groom left the dance, and everyone looked 
toward the bride's home, waiting for the fireworks which would show 
that the bride was a virgin. 

Mariana, who was selling refreshments, told us about it. 

"Now it is over," she said, "there will be only one more dance 
to-morrow, for the old men and the old women, when they will get 
drunk and tear their clothes and scream, not knowing what they are 
doing. But now it is over for the bridal pair, all but the proving. 
How sad the bride will be to-night, how she will cry." 

"And if there are no fireworks?" Chavo asked. 

"Then, senor, it will mean she was not a virgin. Then her husband 
will torture her. He will beat her and ask: 'Who was it? Who was it?' 
He will beat her until she confesses, and then he will return her to 
her mother." 

"How, if they are already married . . .?" 

"Even so, senor. But possibly he may choose to keep her, only it 
will be very bad for her. He will torture her all the time and make 
her very miserable. However," she added with a shrug of contempt, 
"I believe she will be a virgin. These rich ones, they save them- 
selves. She will be a virgin, but she will cry just the same." 

We asked why the bride would cry just the same. 

"Because it will be the first time," Mariana said, "and she will 
suffer very much." 



JUGHITAN WEDDING 99 

Andres's uncle was very drunk that night. He began to beat his 
breast for his mestizo blood. "Look at me," he said abjectly, "I am 
not pure Indian! My blood has been adulterated with the blood of 
the conquerors. That is my great sorrow. Yes, I must confess, I am 
not pure Indian. I am the degenerate son of a once proud race." 
He became more and more abject, pointed to himself as one whose 
life had been miscast in a backward little pueblo, and said the only 
thing he could be proud of in a misspent life was that he had given 
Andres wings to fly from Juchitan. "Wings!" he cried, flailing his 
arms and eyeing us fiercely. "Wings to fly from this wretched little 
village." His daughter finally came and dragged him away, and he 
had time only for a last wave of the hand while he exhorted us: "Go 
forth, O strangers, sing my race, sing my people!" 

Chavo obeyed him that very night by learning a song in Zapo- 
tecan, after the fireworks had come and nearly everyone had gone 
home, and only a few couples remained, dancing over the ground 
strewn with confetti. He had wanted a piano, but failing that, he 
took charge of the marimba and played the songs of the Spanish 
Civil War on it. And then one of the musicians taught him a love- 
song of Juchitan. "The corn and beans are ripe in my field, for you 
my beloved. . . ." But Chavo learned the words in Zapotecan. The 
next morning he sang them in the market-place, while we were having 
refrescos, to a crowd of open-mouthed listeners. I can still remember 
the delighted, hypnotized smile on the face of one of the little boys 
when he heard his own speech coming so strangely from alien lips — 
that which must be a fairly pleasurable experience for the first time, 
and for a young provincial the beginning of wisdom that there are 
other worlds beyond his own. 

The market-place of Juchitan, as in all Tehuantepec, is kept 
entirely by women, while the men are relegated to the inferior work 
of the fields. And whenever we went through the market it was a 
holiday for the women. They would have it that Chavo and I were 
brother and sister, because, "Look you! they are both blond." And 
because of our strange blondness we were treated with awe, but also 
with contempt — like conquering heroes who could only honour them 
by deigning to buy, but also like prisoners of war who must run a 
gauntlet of uncomplimentary remarks. Especially about Chavo's 
hair, which is very curly. Andres translated for us: It was like a 
rat's nest. It was like a fence covered with brambles, like a leafy 
arbour, like the way out of a mountain. 

Mariana kept a stand under the portico, and whenever we came 
she greeted us with: "What does your heart say?" Our hearts usually 
said spicy tostadas, and while we ate she told us about her man who 
was away working on the road building, and how she would not 
marry him because then he would begin to boss her. "It is only for 
the rich," she said, "marriage!" . She was good-looking like all the 



ioo THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

women of Juchitan, but very short and plump, and when she spoke 
she looked thoughtfully at Ghavo. 

We went to the last dance, and watched the drunken antics of the 
old people. They danced over their vomit, smirking and mimicking 
the graces of the young. The marimba beat out a tom-tom, and they 
began to cavort around, crouching, almost on all fours, a dance from 
the ancient past that needed masks and animal heads. Mariana was 
there, very drunk and undone, and she came over and asked Ghavo 
to dance with her. When he hesitated she burst into tears. "You 
despise me!" she said, looking up at the six feet of Ghavo and his 
hair shining in the sun. "You really despise me !" He danced with her. 

It was the last of the wedding festivities, and at night only the 
sound of the wind blew through the plaza. Outside the cantina that 
cast the only light in the windy darkness, we sat drinking beer with 
the village celebrities — the poet who wrote the song Ghavo learned, 
and Andres's uncle who teaches in the school, and the deputy to the 
National Congress. The deputy, a burly fellow with a back-slapping 
manner learned in the capital, threw his leg over his bench as though 
he were mounting horseback. He was dressed like a campesino and 
two splendid pistols gleamed in his belt. 

"He is a politician," Andres told me, sotto voce. "Not the best 
we can do, but he is in favour of schools." 

The talk was of asking the Government for another school in 
Juchitan, and of starting a newspaper in Zapotecan. Mexico's Indian 
groups speak over fifty languages and dialects, and thus far the move- 
ment has been to impose Spanish on these groups, as a unifying thread 
in the patchwork of speeches. All the schools have been conducted 
in Spanish, and the Indian pupils, who have never known a written 
language of their own, have had the double burden of learning to 
read and write in a foreign tongue. The results have not been good, 
for language is the very breath of the inner life. Deprived of their 
own speech, the Indians have lost contact with their own culture and 
traditions, and their habitual forms of thought and feeling. And Mexico 
still remains a country in which nearly half the population is illiterate. 

But now there is a new movement to conduct education in the 
indigenous languages. Education, pamphlets, newspapers, and books 
in the language of each pueblo, with Spanish coming later as the life 
of the pueblo changes and grows modern. The leaders of this move- 
ment are wise, but no wiser than the missionaries who came after the 
conquest, and set themselves to learning the native tongues for pur- 
poses of conversion. Only now the purpose is to create the Mexican 
nation, unified and modern. So Andres, who teaches at the National 
University, talked about a newspaper in Zapotecan, while the deputy 
listened, his large sunburned hands resting on the table. Meanwhile 
Alpha's cousin had gone for his guitar, and routed out the best guitar- 
player in Juchitan, and the two of them came back, already thought- 



JUGHITAN WEDDING ioi 

fully plucking their instruments. Silence felfon the talk as they began 
La Llorona, the love-song that is sung all over the isthmus. 

"You were coming from the church, Llorona, when I first saw 
you, in a huipil so splendid that I thought you were the Virgin." 
The melody begins with a high querulous phrase, falls in a slow 
twisting scale reluctantly downward to the last held note. Then again 
the high-pitched beginning, complaint and reproach, and the slow 
downward twisting, the song caught in an endless spiral of yearning 
and anguish and despair. "Ay, Llorona, Llorona of the heights! I 
am like the mule-driver who comes to the cold height to build him 
a fire." 

There must be a score of known stanzas, but the singers improvise 
more. Andres took the guitar, thrummed a moment, and began: 
"Where you tread, Llorona, on the shore of the sea, where you tread 
on the shore of the sea, the waves bring pearls to the sand . . . Ay, 
Llorona, Llorona of the infinite waves. . . ." This poetic exaggeration 
is greatly appreciated, but the circle of listeners who had gathered 
around us gave no sign. The market was deserted and the women 
had gone home, but the men stood listening with folded arms, relaxed 
and impassive. And the lighted clock in the market-place showed 
twelve before the song of Llorona was over, and the guitars rested on 
the table, and the listeners melted away as silently as they had gathered, 
their white trousers gleaming in the dark. 

The next morning we took the bus to Tehuantepec, the town from 
which the isthmus receives its name. We waved good-bye to the 
women in the market-place as the bus pulled out, but their last shouted 
remarks were lost because we were busy pulling down the canvas 
against the dust. All through the ride over a road that pushed the- 
jungle away on both sides, the dust was like an enemy pursuing us, 
and when the bus stopped the dust caught up and boarded it; but 
the women never covered the piles of tortillas that took up all the 
floor space. Humanity and freight travel together on the isthmus, 
where for the most part the roads are easier for travel by burro than 
by any wheeled vehicle. Andres had said it was easier for those of 
Juchitan to go to Mexico City than to Oaxaca, capital of the state 
and not two hundred miles away. 

The norther died down in Tehuantepec, and the air felt baked, and 
we went to the river, where we lay down on the damp sand and argued 
about the women of Juchitan. Andres said they were probably 
happier than the women of my country. I thought of the huge barn 
at the back of the patio, where the women cooked on an open fire, 
stooping to the flames in the dark smoky air; and of how they walked 
back and forth across the patio, carrying a little water each time in 
a gourd — a stately and picturesque procession with their white ruffles 
sweeping the dust, but also a treadmill of unnecessary steps. And I 
said that at any rate the women of my country would be more effi- 



102 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

cient, and devise some system of running water, and so have time 
for something else. "For what?" Andres asked contemptuously. 
"For dressing themselves and reading stupid books!" He had been 
in the United States and felt he could talk with authority. 

The sun went down and the bathers left the river and a last ox-cart 
crossed it, rumbling noisily on the opposite bank, and then there was 
silence broken only by the distant cry of children and the far-off 
whistling of the train. The railroad tracks run through all the length 
of Tehuantepec, close against the white mud houses, so that it has 
something of the air of a poor suburb in an industrial American city. 
Once Tehuantepec was the centre of all the commerce of the isthmus, 
but now that commerce is a thing of the past, and there is only one 
train a day, which may appear at any time between noon and midnight. 
We heard it whistling nearer now, and Chavo stirred and looked out 
over the river. "This is the way we used to lie in the concentration 
camp," he said, "without food, without shelter, in the winter in 
France." It grew dark and the mosquitoes began to bite, and we got 
up flailing our arms and went back to take the bus to Juchitan. It 
was my last night there. The next day we went to Salina Cruz to 
have a look at the Pacific, and from there I would go directly back 
to Mexico City. 

Dust and jungle again, and the organ cactus lifting huge stiff 
fingers against the sky, and then a bend of the road whirling the sea 
into view. Salina Cruz is a deserted port, bewitched and spellbound, 
with a spell cast on it by history and the fate of nations. It has declined 
with all the isthmus, and the Panama Canal now draws the traffic 
that used to come to the isthmus ports. We walked to the end of the 
breakwater and looked back to the scattered white houses of the town, 
asleep between the sea and the low sierras that have ended their 
march to the sea. There was no sound, only the wind and the sea, 
silence and doom on everything else. On the wharves the lighterage 
cranes hung motionless over the rotting boards, a few rusting freight 
cars stood empty on the tracks. The little boy who showed us a place 
where we might bathe without danger from sharks said that a ship 
might be expected in a few months. Perhaps, he said. 

We sent him ahead to order lunch at the hotel, and meanwhile 
we climbed the cliff to the lighthouse. The lighthouse keeper felt 
called on to justify his office. "There will be boats," he said, shaking 
his head at the Pacific as though it were a recalcitrant child, "when the 
harbour is dredged. Now they cannot enter because of the sand." 

He invited us to share his tortillas, but we went back to the hotel, 
which was justly advertised as 'the most ventilated in Salina Cruz'. 
For the wind blew like a gale through the empty corridors, and through 
the big dining-room and bar where there was never the merrymaking 
of sailors any more. The landlady's little girl served us with world- 
weary poise. She said she was going away to a school in Mexico City 



JUGHITAN WEDDING 103 

soon, and very glad of it, for it was a fine thing to be leaving Salina 
Cruz. "There is nothing to do here," she said. "The movies come 
only once a week." "But bathing?" She sighed as one who is denied 
even the simplest pleasures. "The norther blows too strong, and 
besides, there are sharks." She mentioned them with dainty disdain, 
as one might mention the buzzing of a fly. "Do you know Shirley 
Temple?" she asked me, and I said yes, I had seen her in the movies. 
"But you don't know her personally?" "No, unfortunately not." 
She looked at me from the door with severe disapproval. There was 
a wedding in Salina Cruz, too. In the big hall of the hotel the 
women were twisting white papers into long streamers and hanging 
them from the ceiling. There would be a wedding dance under 
the streamers, but just one dance. Salina Cruz does not follow 
the customs of Juchitan, for the sea has weaned it from the rest of 
the isthmus. 

And brought strange fish to it. At night in the tiny cahtina near 
the docks we met a tall, lanky Scotsman, and a Cockney-speaking 
Englishman. Andres looked at them and said with malicious joy: 
"Speak to them in English. See if they understand you." And the 
look on the face of the Scotsman when I addressed him in English was 
pure ecstasy. We all sat down and the Scotsman pledged us in Spanish 
and Gaelic and ordered a carton of beer to be sent to his house, where 
we were to go afterward to meet his wife. She was a native girl named 
Teresina, but the Scotsman called her Terry. He was terribly afraid 
that we would disapprove of his having married her, but he said he 
couldn't help it, because she was beautiful and he loved her, and he 
would lay down his life for her, or at least spend the rest of it in Salina 
Cruz just to be near her. We said we thought it was O.K., and Andres 
drank, "To the triumph of the mongrel!" The Englishman also was 
married to a native girl, but he was rather morose about it, and silent. 
When he did speak, in a thick Cockney brogue, I could not under- 
stand him. Andres and Chavo looked at each other as much as to 
say: "You see? She doesn't really know the King's English." 

Terry came in, and she was beautiful. She sat by smiling while 
the Scotsman told us how he wanted to leave Salina Cruz because 
there was no more work there. An American company had been 
dredging the harbour, but it was being replaced by a Mexican com- 
pany. He might work with this company, but he didn't like working 
for Mexicans. So he wanted to go away from Salina Cruz, but 
he was afraid to travel with Terry, because in some place like 
Vera Cruz she would surely go off with another man. A younger 
man. We asked Terry about it and she said no, but we didn't 
feel sure. She had a baby with her, a very dark, thin little thing, but 
it turned out that it was not hers and the Scotsman's. It seems they 
could not have a baby, and he asked us whether we thought it was 
because he was Scotch and Terry Indian, But anyway they had a 



104 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

dog with a wonderful name. He went outside and called it. "Caral- 
ampio !" 

I was worried about the train, but the Scotsman insisted that we 
go to his house. There Ghavo banged the piano while the English- 
man sang Rule, Britannia and the Scotsman did contortions, flinging 
his leg over his shoulder. On the wall there were big lithographs of 
the ships of the British Navy, looking very becalmed and unmaritime. 
And when we left and walked across the plaza to the station, the town, 
too, seemed no more than a lithograph in the moonlight, so still and 
unreal it was, with only the norther blowing a gale from the land. 
And blowing all night, while the train creaked slowly through the 
sierras, away from the forgotten towns of the isthmus to the high central 
plateau of Mexico. 



14 



THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD 

The rains stopped and in their stead came the dust; walls of 
yellow dust moving in from the barren mountains to the north, 
as if these had changed their essence and were on the march. 
In the early afternoons the streets were dark as twilight, and one 
tasted dust and breathed it, and almost touched it in the air. People 
shook their heads over the rains. There was fear for the crops. "The 
waters have ceased too early," everyone said. The valley needed 
rain, and instead it was being smothered in a dry death. 

But the dust-storms stopped, too, and there came a morning of 
yellow sky and a stillness in the air, and then a movement of wind 
and a sound of thunder in the mountains. It grew cold in the after- 
noon and the sky filled with clouds, low and opaque, weirdly purple. 
The hailstorm broke soon after. The drops were as big as pebbles 
and came slanting against the window, rebounding with the fury of 
their fall and with a sound as of thousands of drums. In the lot there 
were faint cries, the women calling to the children, and then nothing 
but the whiteness and fury of the hail. When it was over the sky 
shone with a polished deep blue and a radiant sun. But the ground 
was still white with hail and the air as cold as night. 

Ofelia and her little sister came up, very excited. "Ay, what a 
storm! Holy heart! The whole house is drenched and there is hail 
on the floor and on the bed." 

They were barefoot, wet and shivering. "Put on shoes," I said, 
"and keep out of the wet." But they went on about the storm. 

"Aunt Delfina was caught in the street She came in nearly 



106 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

beaten to death. But all the rest of us were in the house, and rnv 
mother said we should pray, and we fell on our knees and prayed, 
and with that the storm went away. Ay, what a storm. Sacred heart !" 

The children of the lot played in the hail, running over it with 
bare feet, shrieking with the coldness of it. But that night Ofelia 
and her little sister were sick. They sat on the bed, bright-eyed and 
rosy, but quiet as if speech had been stricken from them. I said they 
should be put to bed, but Mrs. Escoto shrugged. "Pues . . . the bed 
is soaked through, senora, and besides, it is nothing. It is very natural 
after the cold and the hail." 

"It will pass," Aunt Delfina said. "To-morrow they will be all 
right." 

In the morning the two of them lay on the bed, still rosy-looking 
as if in the first flush of slumber. But their foreheads were burning 
and Ofelia did not open her eyes when I spoke to her. The women 
were frightened now — not because the children were sick, but because 
they had surrendered to their sickness. They were frightened by their 
lying down, this pantomime of death. "Let them get up and move 
around," Aunt Delfina said complainingly. "Then they'll be all 
right." And Mrs. Escoto nodded. For as long as one moved around, 
all was well. The appearance of life and health was a strong enough 
magic to make any sickness go away. But once one lay down and 
surrendered — that was a magic that invited death. 

I persuaded them to stuff the draughty holes in the wall with paper 
and to put dry covering on the bed. Mrs. Escoto gathered the straw 
sleeping mats. They had been sunned in the morning and they were 
the only things in the house that were dry. Later, Lutzie came with 
tea and pills and a thermometer. "You measure the fever with this," 
she said, and told them how to use it. The women handed the thermo- 
meter from one to another with respectful acquiescence. But they 
had not used it when I came back in the afternoon. "It is very hard 
to use," Mrs. Escoto said. "I have no head for numbers." It was 
raining again and the hut was chilly and damp, smelling of the char- 
coal fire in the next room, that gave smoke but no warmth. The 
women sat on packing-cases with their arms folded over the ends 
of their rebozos. They thanked me effusively for coming, but begged 
me not to come again. "So much bother for you," Mrs. Escoto said, 
rocking herself gently. "So much bother for nothing." Because all 
this fuss was dangerous, a bad magic certain to attract the lurking 
death. And above all, to call a doctor! "No," Mrs. Escoto said firmly, 
"it is not necessary, senora. Not necessary by any means." 

But that night we sat in the hut waiting for Doctor Gonzalez. 
"That Lupita!" Mrs. Escoto said. "She is babbling about the chickens 
that died. But Ofelia, she cries out that she is afraid. Who knows 
of what she babbles?" But I thought I knew, or could guess. Was 
it Manrique? 



THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD 107 

He was pursuing her, flying over the tree-tops of the Reforma, 
large and black as a monstrous crow . . . and waving his arms, and 
the light was flashing like lightning on his glasses, and she ran before 
him looking up and screaming because her legs would not move, and 
at any moment she must fall. Tou must go to school, Ofelia, you must 
go to school. Mortal sin, mortal sin! O father, I have sinned! I 
confessed and did not wash my mouth afterward. O father, because 
the devil was in the box and he winked at me, and I took him in 
my arms, small as a bird against the breast, and I kissed him, father, 
and did not wash my mouth. Tou must go to school, Ofelia, you must 
go to school. In my apron ? It's not an apron, fool, can't you see it's 
a shroud and you are dead? The mordelon killed you. He took 
you down into the earth, deeper than the heart of the volcanoes, and 
did it to you there, and you are dead under the earth, dead and my 
feet cannot move, and the devil dances over me like a little bird. 
Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, nothing can happen . . . Gome away, 
sefiora, come away, because the earth is crumbling and piling on top 
of me and the devil is in my mouth like a live coal. O father, let 
me close my mouth, give me the wafer I am burning — deep deep 
under the earth where there is a sound of thunder. You must go to 
school, Ofelia, you must go to school. He took off his glasses and hurled 
them to the earth and two burning candles sprang from them in front 
of the altar. They grew large as white pillars, but whirling with 
flames, and the Virgin stood between them with a terrible mask on 
her face, and the devil flew out from her breasts like a little bird, in 
the form of a little white bird. Qjiick, quick . . . the wafer, father. 
Her arms flailed in the air trying to catch it, but it danced like a 
feather in the wind and she was flying over the tree-tops with her 
arms reaching out for it, trying to catch it. But it spread its wings 
and grew monstrous as the face of the earth, and danced over her 
where she lay, deep under the earth in a whirling darkness. The 
mordelon did it to you, the mordelonl And his name was Edouardo. 
Ed-ou-ardo. 

But the apron did not cover her, and she was walking through 
the market dying of shame because the apron did not cover her, and 
the hypnotist smiled and said: "Put it down, put the box down." 

"But I can't, I can't." 

"Of course you can, it is easy." 

"I am looking for Edouardo." 

"He is in the box. He's a little bird." 

"He has my apron." 

And Edouardo came toward her, smiling, with a bag of crackers 
in his hand. "There's an extra cracker," he said, "tell the sefiora." 
And then the hypnotist took her hand and they were walking along 
the canal, and she was dying of shame because her apron did not 
cover her. She was going to school with the box in her hand, and 



108 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

they came to her house where Daniel was lying dead, only he was 
very small, and her mother lifted him up and put him away and 
said: "To-morrow is his wedding." Then she opened her book and 
wrote her name and she was in school, and Manrique said: "You 
must go to school, Ofelia, you must go to school." Then Daniel began 
to cry like a baby, and her mother lifted him up and gave him to the 
priest, who put the wafer on his forehead, and Daniel began to move 
and Manrique said, "Now he is not dead any more." She was still 
in the hut yet she was in school, and Manrique said : "The senora 
wants you to sweep with this," and he gave her a pencil covered with 
tooth-marks. "That's because everyone goes to school," he said. She 
went on writing faster and faster with wonderful skill, and there was 
a strange light all around her and she was exceedingly happy, and 
then she began to sweep with the pencil Manrique gave her. But it 
grew bigger and bigger in her hands until she could not hold it any 
more, but she could not put it down either, her fingers stuck to it. 
"Don't be afraid" said the hypnotist, "don't be afraid." But the pencil 
kept growing, taller than the candles in front of the Virgin, and it 
flamed like a candle and grew monstrous and unending, and she 
fell in a faint before it, plummeting down into whirling blackness. 
Mortal sin, mortal sinl O father, I have sinned, give me the wafer 
because I am thirsty, because the devil is in my mouth like a live coal. 

Gome away, senora, come away, because the devil is in the box 
and he flies like a bird, and he is under the hands of the Virgin between 
her breasts, moving to be free, and he dances over me lightly as a 
bird, but I cannot move, I cannot touch him. Gome away, I am afraid, 
I am afraid. But the hypnotist smiled, waving his hands in the air. 
"Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, nothing can happen." But the 
mordelon was going too fast and she could not keep up with him, 
and she ran after him and she called, Edouardo, Edouardo. And then 
she was not afraid, but stepped on to the motor-cycle and held his 
waist, and they went very fast down the Reforma, faster than the 
wind. And the motor-cycle lifted into the air and flew like a bird, and 
everyone stood on the Reforma looking up, and she was ashamed, 
ashamed. And she begged Edouardo to stop, but he was holding her 
and they were flying together, flying strangely together, and he was 
holding her, but deep under the earth, deeper than the heart of the 
volcanoes. And she could not move, she was dead with her apron 
around her like a shroud, winding and winding, endlessly winding. . . . 

"It is fifty centavos," the woman said, and she began to cut the apron 
from the bolt of cloth. 

"That's enough," the senora said, "that's enough." 

But the apron kept unwinding itself, unwinding, unwinding, and 
she could not stop it and she screamed because it was a shroud. 

Come away, senora, come away. "Yes, we are going to school," 
the senora said. But the hypnotist smiled and said, "Don't be afraid," 






THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD 109 

and she was walking through the market-place looking for the box, 
and her apron did not cover her but nobody noticed, but she was 
dying of shame. Then she had the box in her hand. She opened it 
and Manrique's glasses were in it, but they crumbled to powder 
when she touched them, and he was angry and ran after her, and 
she screamed with no voice and her feet would not move. And she 
was running, running, trying to catch the glasses, but they danced 
before her like a feather in the wind, like the wafer, like the bird. 
And she ran down the aisle of the church and flew up over the altar 
to the window, and the hypnotist was standing there with the box in 
his hand, and whirling it round and round, and she began to whirl 
with it like a pinwheel, through whirling blackness with a thunder 
in her ears — you must go to school, Ofelia, you must go to school. 

The doctor came and examined the children while the women 
looked on silently. "Warmth," he said. "Warmth." The damp and 
the cold would be fatal. There was a great scurrying around while 
the women built a little fireplace of bricks in the room where the 
children lay, and the beds were remade with sheets and blankets that 
Lutzie brought. 

"I have been busy since the storm," Doctor Gonzalez said, when 
we were walking in the fresh night air. "Our people are not prepared 
for cold weather. They are not prepared for anything. In three of 
the poor families that I take care of, already there have been deaths." 

It was Lupita who died in the Escoto family, though she seemed 
to have been getting better more quickly than Ofelia. I had gone 
away to Ixmiquilpan for a few days, and did not know about it until 
I returned. There was a wreath and a white ribbon on the door of 
the hut. 

Lutzie said they had kept the body until one could not pass the 
hut, because they hoped that Seiior Escoto would return in time to 
see it. But he had not come, and the Germans and Manolo and 
other people on the block had insisted on the funeral. I could imagine 
how the funeral had been, because there is a high death-rate in 
Mexico, and the funerals of the poor are always part of the city's 
traffic. It was probably a pullman funeral. The mourners sit all in 
one bus, and, except that there is no sign of gaiety in their faces, one 
might think they are going on some excursion beyond the city. No 
gaiety and no grief. The mourners sit stolidly looking out on the 
streets, and perhaps they cannot help thinking how strange and 
wonderful the streets seem, viewed from this brief vantage of the 
funerary bus. It speeds to the cemetery, and the whole thing cannot 
take more than a few whisking moments. And thus, with dispatch, 
they bury their dead. 

Ofelia said they had taken Lupita to the pantheon of Dolores. 
The graves in that cemetery are only rented, and when the time expires 



no THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

a payment must be made or the body is disinterred. The papers 
make a great scandal about the disinterred bodies. "It would have 
been better in my tierra," Ofelia said. "It is cheaper there." 

Now they talked often of going back to their tierra. Sefior Escoto 
had returned with news of Daniel. Ofelia did not know what it was, 
but she said confidently, "He will be back very soon now. And when 
he comes we will return to Atotonilco." She sighed and added: "It 
seems we are not for the city. Much has befallen us here." An air 
of quiet sadness hung over the lot, but from the Reforma and the 
neighbouring streets came the echo of drums and bugle calls, which 
seemed like a martial farewell for poor little Lupita. It was the 
week of the fiestas patrias, the national holidays that commemorate 
the independence uprising of 1810. The city was bedecked with 
flags and coloured lights, workers and soldiers were parading, and 
the campesinos were streaming in from the countryside by the thou- 
sands. There would be a celebration in the Great Plaza on the night 
of 1 6th September, with fireworks and cannons and the ringing of 
the independence bell exactly on the stroke of eleven — the same h5ur 
when it was rung over a century ago by the priest Hidalgo, in the 
little parish of Dolores. But Ofelia would not see any of the parades. 
"My mother has forbidden it, senora. She says I must keep off the 
streets now because there are so many federals around." She always 
called a soldier a federal, and ran from one in fear. Because the federals 
came from one side and the rebels came from the other, and there was 
much shooting. ... So I could not take her to the parades, nor to 
the celebration in the plaza. But I went with Manrique and we fought 
our way through the crowds, and heard the bell and saw the fireworks, 
and bought false noses and the snakes that blow out suddenly and 
frighten you. The man who sold them said they were 'mother-in-law 
frighteners'. 

"But my mother is very nice," Manrique said, resuming an old 
theme. "You would not have to frighten her." 

"No, Manrique, no. It cannot be," I answered. "Besides, I am 
in love with a mordelon." He looked at me queerly. 

I saw very little of the Escotos now. The women were silent when 
I came, and I could not help a feeling of guilt. If only I had insisted 
that the doctor come again, or if I had let Lupita stay in my apart- 
ment, warm and dry, instead of worrying that it would interfere with 
the intelligence tests. By now I had developed a great indifference 
to the I.Q/s of the Otomfs, though it was not entirely because of 
Lupita. Having proved that the Otomfs react as intelligently in the 
tests as other races do, only that they react more slowly, I felt that 
there was no conclusion to be drawn — unless, of course, the obvious 
conclusion that more time must be allowed for Otomi reaction. 
Which brings us, if not to a vicious circle, at least to an inane 
one. 



THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD in 

I had undertaken the testing to begin with only at the persuasion 

of Senor R of the Department of Indigenous Affairs. He is a 

great admirer of the Americans. We are a wonderful people, scientific 
in everything, and in our zeal for objective knowledge we do not 
spare even that imponderable quality called intelligence. He con- 
siders the I.Q,. one of our great inventions, and, astute politician that 
he is, he apparently felt it would be most impressive to his superiors 
to show them this scientific folderol of the tests, and also very impressive 
and pleasing to visiting North American educators. And he would 
write, as he later did, in the Department's annual report: 'We are 
elaborating new scientific tests for the measurement of the intelligence 
of our indigenous groups, with a view to greater exactitude in the 
planning of pedagogic programmes ' 

Irrelevant pomposities, jargon borrowed from the visiting North 
American educators, and a foreign language to Mexico. For the 
Mexican realities are different from ours. Our educational thought, 
product of our prosperity, is concerned with polishing, refining, and 
adorning the educational process. Our educators speak a highly 
intellectualized language, made up of abstract ideas and occupational 
technicalities — a language that is often pure nonsense, and that has 
very little content when it is not nonsense. Our education is remote 
from the real processes and needs of our society, it has lost its way; 
and our educators, like poets in a period of decadence, waste them- 
selves in preciousness and in subtleties and figures of speech. But 
meanwhile our prestige is such that there is a flow of translated 
pamphlets to our Latin-American neighbours, about the methods of 
this or that private school in some prosperous suburb in Connecticut; 
about some pedagogic experiment much bedevilled with scientific 
checks and counter-checks. It is rarefied, useless manna to lands that 
are literally parching with thirst, where the elementary needs of water 
and food and shelter and clothing must yet be conquered. Let us stop 
sending them the intellectual waste-products of our abundance, and 
really try to understand them. 

Of course, it is not all black and white here or in Mexico ; but 
that is how I felt, working on the report of 'los intelligence tests'. 
There are some words that Mexicans rarely translate, I suppose because 
they regard them as inviolately North-American, the pure essence of 
our culture. They talk of 'los go-getters', 'el noqueout', 'el record' 
(as in drinking more beer than anyone else, or eating a greater number 
of apple pies), and 'los intelligence tests'. 

But there were some facts still missing for my paper — question of 
correlating race and juvenile delinquency — and I was to get them 
from Senor Gomez of the Tribunal for Minors. Like all Mexican 
officials sought out by investigating Americans, he welcomed me with 
great courtesy and put himself at my Service. Then I waited for the 
inevitable apologies. Mexicans understand that Americans are 



ii2 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

ravenous for documents, studies, statistics — conclusions in handy pill 
form. But documents, studies, and statistics are rare in Mexico. The 
rage for research into social questions — all that mass of paper work 
which in the United States is sometimes necessary, sometimes merely 
stupid narcissism, and sometimes dishonest special pleading — has not 
yet attacked Mexico. So that usually you are sent from one office 
to another, and each time an elderly gentleman, with a beard more 
splendid than the one before, rises from a desk and says, "Yes, we have 
nothing — Si, no hay nada." But Senor G6mez was very proud. In 
the Tribunal for Minors they had a medico-pedagogico-psychiatric 
department, very well documented. I could look through bulging 
case histories if I wished — and he slapped the pile on his desk. But 
frankly, and here he lapsed into the natural Mexican, he would rather 
talk to me about the work or have me see it in action. "Then it's 
very simple," he said. "You observe and form the conclusions indi- 
cated." 

And before I could choose I was seated next to his desk, to observe 
the tribunal in action. Five delinquent boys stood before him, in the 
blue overalls that they receive on entering the tribunal. They were 
misshapen rachitic-looking youngsters, with the brush-like hair of the 
mentally defective. Their faces showed neither fear nor uneasiness 
nor guilt, only passive endurance of their days. Senor G6mez called 
for their case histories, gave the folders a perfunctory glance, and 
then shoved them aside. "Hombre! . . . Man!" he said, looking at 
the boys with genuine irritation. "What did you come back for? 
What have you been up to now?" The boys started to explain, while 
their judge got up and paced back and forth, sat down, got up again 
and leaned against the desk, kneading his chin. The boys went on 
explaining, and soon everyone was gesticulating with all the eloquence 
of a family quarrel. G6mez reasoned with them, argued, cajoled — 
completely absorbed as if he had his own delinquent offspring before 
him. I would not say that this is the best form of social work, but 
certainly it is a possible form. 

One of the boys had stolen seven pairs of glasses and given a pair 
to each of the others to sell in the Plaza. You can buy anything that 
way. The boy runs beside you, holding up a fountain-pen or a wallet 
or a cigarette-case like bait to lead you on. "Please, sefiora, buy it," 
he whines. "Please, sefiora, I have only one, it is my brother's. Buy 
it, sefiora, that I may buy myself something to eat." 

"And you!" G6mez turned indignantly to the oldest boy. "Didn't 
you know when you saw the seven pairs of glasses that they v/ere 
stolen?" 

"No, senor." 

"Does your friend here ever wear glasses?" 

"No, senor." 

"And yet you thought that he suddenly needed seven pairs?" 



THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD 113 

They smiled slowly, and Senor Gomez sat back, shaking his head. 
"A fine business, a fine business." 

Then he turned to me. "You must forgive me, seflorita, that I 
am so upset. But we judges are here in lieu of father and mother. 
Most of these boys, as you see, are neglected. They have no homes, 
or what they have of one does not deserve the name. This one here" 
— he shook his pencil at the smallest boy — "gave as his address a 
certain number on the Calle de Argentina. We investigated and 
found it was the site of a junk-pile. Actually, his parents had lived 
there, but they disappeared, and also the hovel that served them for 
shelter. But the boy came back with the instinct of a cat and slept 
there every night. And you — " He turned to another of the boys. 
"Are you with your parents again?" 

"No, senor, I have left them." 

"And where do you stay?" 

"In a hotel, senor." 

"You live there?" 

"No, senor. I sleep there. Back of the Hotel Lido, in an alley." 
He pointed with his chin at the pile of case histories. "It's my new 
address. Put it down." 

The boys filed out with more animation than they had shown when 
they came in. At least it had been a catharsis. They had laughed 
and talked and known the intimacy of a paternal scolding. But their 
judge sighed. 

"You Americans are very wise in these things," he said, "very 
advanced. Here we are beginning, and we must learn from you. 
But look you! Here we are very different. The mind" — he tapped 
his forehead, for the Mexican gesture is always a pantomime of the 
words spoken — "the mind is different! We are informal, no? I should 
be sitting on a bench, high up" — he indicated height — "and looking 
down on the boys, no? Pues ..." He shrugged and disposed briskly 
of the case histories and summoned a young man who had been 
waiting in the corner. "The next case will interest you. You will 
learn much of our Mexican psychology." 

The young man was a lawyer, and G6mez greeted him with a 
sarcasm I was supposed to admire. "So, licenciado! So we are to 
try this case on legal grounds! Our client has a lawyer, eh? And 
the law says this and that ..." He turned to me and continued in 
a very loud whisper: "In the time of the fourth viceroy the Mexicans 
sent a petition to the Spanish Crown begging that no more lawyers 
be sent to New Spain. Mind you ! In the time of the fourth viceroy ! 
Already there were too many lawyers in Mexico. Well, senor licenciado, 
and where is your client?" 

The client had disappeared. He had been seen in the building in 
the morning, but for some reason or other he had disappeared. 

"The father, too?" 



ii 4 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

"That's it. The father and the son. They both were here, they 
poked their heads into the room, and then they disappeared." 

Senor G6mez drummed on the table, looked at the clock, and 
reached a decision. "Well, in any case it is lunch-time. Have your 
clients here to-morrow, licenciado, without fail — the father and the 
son, and the girl and her mother, too, including that — that" — his 
hands scooped the air — "that little entity which is the wherefore of 
the present disturbance." 

The lawyer smiled joylessly and gathered up his papers. Court 
was adjourned, and I went out, down the wide stairway and through 
the broad patio, to the wrought-iron doors that were open to the 
sunny street without guards. The colonial mansions that the con- 
querors built serve the Mexicans well now for public buildings. They 
are light and spacious, and the communal centre of the patio is 
splendid for frescoes. The boys who were interned in the tribunal 
were eating at tables in the patio. They must stay in the tribunal 
three weeks, under observation, until a decision is reached as to where 
they should be sent. In Tlalpan and Tacubaya, once flourishing 
centres of Aztec culture and now suburbs of the city, there are homes 
for delinquent minors. While I had been at the tribunal a young man 
had come in and asked that he be sent back to one of these homes. 
"It is best for me," he said. "It is best for us," he added, "for us 
who have no other remedy in life." 



15 

DANIEL 

The father and the son who had disappeared were Daniel and 
Senor Escoto. When I arrived at the tribunal the next morning, 
they were both there, standing in front of the desk. 
"We have been waiting for you," Gomez said briskly, getting me 
seated. "I should like you to observe this case closely, because it is 

very typical of our Mexicans. This boy here " He signalled his 

assistant to bring the case history. 

Daniel grinned at me unembarrassed, but his father leaned across 
the desk, timidly pleading. "If you please, Senor Judge, the lady and 
I are neighbours. It is not right that she should know of this. If 
you please ..." He fell silent, looking down and turning his hat in 
his hand, while the judge studied the case history. "Pues ... let her 
stay," he said after a while, softly, as if to himself. "Let her stay- 
now that she has seen us. That she does not go away thinking it was 
a robbery or a homicide, or something more evil than it is." 




H* 



Ii6 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

The lawyer came in with a brief-case, and then a young girl and 
her mother entered. Daniel and the girl exchanged glances — hers 
defiant, his amused with a superior male amusement. She was a very 
pretty young girl. 

"Good!" G6mez leaned back, whirling a pencil in his hand while 
he contemplated Daniel and the girl. "You two, do you know each 
other ?" 

"Pero un momento, hagame el favour — the legal points!" The 
lawyer flourished his brief, but Senor G6mez waved it away impa- 
tiently, and he continued waving it away throughout the trial, and 
each time I thought how he was simply tossing out all the hard-earned 
pesos that Daniel's father must have paid for the lawyer's services. 
Or was it true, after all, that the robbery at the licenciado's . . . 

"Of course I know this girl," Daniel was saying. "Everybody 
knows her " 

"O senor! That you listen to me!" the girl burst out. "He is 
lying. He calumniates me. He is a shameless one." 

The judge looked at her rebukingly, and then lifted his thumb and 
forefinger. The signal meant ahorita — 'a little now'. (In a little now 
you will be permitted to talk.) It is one of the commonest gestures 
in the Mexican's vast repertory of sign language, and it may be varied 
by bringing the thumb and forefinger closer together, when it means 
'a very little now'. And then, if it is the waiters in a restaurant who 
thus signals to you, you may be sure that you have only another half- 
hour to wait before the food is brought to you. 

"Here you have our Mexicans," G6mez said in an aside to me. 
"Lacking in discipline, in that marvellous discipline of you North- 
Americans." Then he turned to Daniel again. "Very well, now. 
How long have you known this girl?" 

'Pues. . . ." Daniel folded his arms and put one leg forward, 
assuming the posture of a man prepared to defend himself, but bored 
by the necessity. "Know that the boss sends me often to the outskirts 
of the city, there where the canal is, to the kiln to make purchases of 
bricks which are needed in the houses under construction yonder, 
in the colonia Cuatemoc street of Atoyac, where I myself had employ- 
ment, or did have until recently, before this woman here deprived 
me of my senses " 

"Please, young man — the facts!" 

"It's a fact," Daniel shrugged. "This woman here- 



"Ay, senor, that you hear me!" the girl's mother interrupted. 
"Is it just that he calumniate my daughter? Does the law allow it? 
No, the shoe is on the other foot. We are decent people. ..." 

I looked at Daniel's father. He stood looking down, turning his 
hat in his hand in deep abstraction, as though remote from all that 
was being said. Was he thinking that it had been wrong for them to 
leave their tierra and come to the city? All the evil that had befallen 
them! Lupita . . . and now Daniel. But did not death exist in 



DANIEL *U7 

his tierra, too ? And were there not young girls everywhere to deprive 
a man of his senses ? All the evil ... all the evil. He sighed and 
looked up. "If you please, Sefior Judge, that we do not make a long 
thing of this. The boss is waiting for me." 

"Certainly, but still we must have the facts. Now, young man, 
that you give us the facts." 

"Precisely!" Daniel smiled, shifting his posture. "As I was 
saying ... it happens or it did happen that very frequently I used 
to go beyond the city, to the kiln for a purchase of bricks, a journey 
sufficiently long so that I was obliged to take the bus " 

G6mez lifted a warning finger. "What is pertinent, young man." 

"But it is pertinent, senor. You wish me to tell how I came to 
know this girl?" 

"That is the point." 

"Very well. I am telling you." 

"Then proceed to tell me." 

"That is what I am doing." 

"Then please do so." 

"Certainly. With your permission, sefior. As I was saying . . . 
it occurred one day that I was waiting for the bus there near the canal, 
and the girl was waiting there too, and as it happened that the bus 
delayed a long time, we looked at each other frequently, and then it 
occurred that we were talking to each other concerning this very 
matter of the bus. And as the bus continued to delay — well, we did 
not lack time for talking, as a result of which I learned where she lived 
and a few other matters which certainly she would not have told me 
if she had not wished to see me again. For from the very beginning, 
sefior " 

"Mire usted! What is pertinent!" 

"Yes, senor. Very well, then. As I was saying, the girl told me 
where she lived, and one day being in the vicinity again, and wishing 
to verify the address — out of mere curiosity, you understand, to learn 
if she had dealt with me honourably or had merely been making sport 
of me, as happens very often in these matters — well, I directed my 
steps toward her house, which I found without difficulty, for it is the 
only house between the canal and Guadalupe, but nearer to Guadalupe, 
so that it is not too far to walk there. Which is also pertinent, senor, 
with your permission. For I figured it out ... I would knock at 
the door and say I was on my way to Guadalupe to see the Virgin. 
And since I am not from these parts and have never seen her, what 
more natural than that I should be going to see her? And I had, 
moreover, the bag which the girl had given me that day of the bus 
to help me in carrying the things which I had purchased there on 
my way to the kiln. And I would say that I had stopped in to return 
it as I was going to Guadalupe, though actually it was a thing of no 
value and we had not arranged that I should return it. So, as I was 



n8 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

saying, I went to the house and knocked and the mother came to the 
door. 'She is not at home, 5 she said. 'She has gone to Guadalupe to 
see the wedding.' 'Well, I am going to Guadalupe myself, 5 I said, 
'and as I wish to return this bag to her. . . .' 'You can leave it here, 5 
the mother said, and took it from me. And as the mother stood watch- 
ing me when I left, I was obliged indeed to go to Guadalupe, though 
actually it was necessary for me to go to the kiln to arrange for another 
purchase of bricks. 55 

So he struck out across the fields. The earth was muddy and the 
walking slow, and the sun was pleasantly warm; so that he had no 
desire to hurry, but strolled with his hands in his pockets, walking 
on the yielding earth. And he thought also that thus, by not hurrying, 
he might meet her returning through the fields. Beyond he could 
see the towers of Guadalupe, with the Cathedral rising on a hill 
over the purple-dark trees and the white houses. The dome of it 
was a golden glory in the sun and around it clustered the domed chapels, 
golden too, and nearer there was a line of tall poplars that marked the 
highway. They said there would soon be a new highway going past 
Guadalupe to join the great road that went to the United States, 
and they said that people earned a great deal of money in the United 
States. He would go there sometimes, because he was a man for 
travel and for studying strange things. He would go to Michigan 
and New York and he would come back to his pueblo wearing an 
American shirt and an American hat, and telling everyone of the 
wonders he had seen over there. 

And thinking of these things he came to the town. But by now 
it was past noon and there was no use in turning back to the kiln 
because nobody would be there. So. he walked through the streets of 
Guadalupe, and he remembered that the girl had gone to the Cathedral 
to see the wedding. He thought that he might go there, too, and find 
her. And if not he would see the Virgin whom he had long wanted 
to see, the most famous Virgin in all Mexico. It was like a holy day 
inside the Cathedral, with all the people who had come to see the 
wedding; and the air was heavy with the perfume of flowers and there 
was a glory of lights, and everyone was pressing toward the altar 
to see the richly dressed wedding guests, and the soldiers who were 
waiting with their swords ready to form an arch for the bride and 
bridegroom. He walked around looking for the girl and once he 
thought he saw her, kneeling with a candle in her hand. But it wasn't 
she, and there were so many people that he knew he would not find 
her. And then he went looking for the Virgin and found her in a 
splendid altar of marble and gold, and he knelt down and looked up 
at her; but all the time thinking of the girl whom he could not drive 
from his mind because he was obsessed with this desire to see her. 
And he was ashamed to be thinking of the girl and praying to the Virgin 
at the same time, and so he went out of the church in order that he 



DANIEL 119 

might think of her without sacrilege, and he walked through the 
market. . . . 

"Please, senor, will you tell me — was it in Guadalupe that you 
met the girl again?" 

"I am telling you, senor. It was not in Guadalupe." 

"Then will you tell me where it was?" 

"Certainly. I am coming to that. As I was saying, being obsessed 
with the idea of seeing her. ..." 

"You were obsessed?" 

"Yes, senor, I was obsessed. . . ." 

He could not sleep that night for thinking of the girl, and in the 
days that followed he could not rid himself of the desire to see her. 
It was a fever and a thirst, and he was like one possessed. So one 
day he went to her house again, but this time he went boldly without 
excuses. But again she was not there and the mother stood at the door 
watching him as he went away. So that there was no way of waiting 
for the girl, unless he were to come back and hide in the ditch beyond 
the house, which would be to make himself ridiculous. So he walked 
along the canal wondering how he could contrive to meet her, and 
then an idea occurred to him and he went back and entered a store 
which was on the canal, but still within sight of the house. He ordered 
a re fresco and while he drank it he asked: "To whom do those horses 
in the field belong?" 

"Naturally, to the Senor Licenciado Don Carlos Rosales de la 
Selva," said the man. "They are his horses." 

"I suppose he has someone to care for them?" 

"Naturally. Alfredo takes care of them." 

"Ah . . . then there is no need of my applying. I am experienced 
with horses. I was a stable boy in my tierra." 

"No, there is no need." 

"But Alfredo lives in that house?" 

"He lives there. He is a bachelor." 

"Strange ... I saw a woman there as I passed." 

"That is his sister. He lives with his sister and her daughter. 
They are former servants of the senor, and therefore he permits them 
to stay there." 

"That is very kind of him." 

"Certainly it is kind, for they are very poor. But then they care 
for the chickens and the girl brings the little white ones to the senor. 
Just this morning she went with a basketful of them." 

"Then it is not far where the senor lives?" 

"No farther than Tacubaya." • 

He finished his refresco and went out, and then he went to Tacu- 
baya and found the house and waited outside, never looking away 
from the gates ; for it was a great house behind gardens and trees and 
there were several gates, and he was afraid he would not see the girl 



120 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

coming out. And at last he saw her, leaving with the basket in which 
she had carried the eggs, and he spoke to her and he was beside 
himself with joy at seeing her; but angry also for the pain she had 
caused him. And in his anger and joy he said foolish things — called her 
his heart and his life and other endearments, and he would not let 
her go until she had consented to go with him to the fair in Tacubaya, 
that night on the Feast of Saint Joseph. 

"And in this manner," said Daniel, "as I have just explained, the 
girl and I became sweethearts." 

"O sefior, he is lying. We never became sweethearts, for that was 
never in his mind. Ask him, do me the favour to ask him if that 
was ever in his mind. It was only, "Please, Luisita!' 'Luisita, I want 
you!' 'Luisita, I am dying!' A shameless thing, without sentiment or 
delicacy." 

"You are sure of that? Because this of being sweethearts is a 
serious matter." 

"Certainly it is serious. And therefore I tell you, there never was 
any talk of that. He never even gave me his picture, sefior. You 
may see in my house there is no picture of him." 

Daniel snorted. "And how if she had destroyed the picture?" 

"Please, young man, that you allow me to question the witness!" 
He shook his pencil at the girl. "You would say, then, that you felt 
for him only the sentiment of friendship ?" 

"Sefior, it was a thing like this. He followed me and followed me 
there in Tacubaya, and in Guadalupe and wherever I went. Where- 
ever I turned he was there, begging me: 'Please, Luisita, I am going 
crazy.' 'Just one more time, Luisita, once more, and then I will 
leave you alone.' So that each time I took pity on him, and I spoke 
to him out of pity, seeing him so obsessed. . . ." 

"Ah . . . one moment. Then we may say that out of pity you 
were obliged to give yourself to him, too?" 

The girl coloured and did not answer, and Daniel looked at her 
smiling, very male and amused. "Ay, Luisita," he said, "how you 
lie ! It grieves me the way you are lying. Then you don't remember 
those nights in Tacubaya ..." 

"Please, young man, I must forbid you to address the witness." 
Gomez leaned back, stroking his chin while he looked from Daniel 
to the girl. Then he looked at the case history, and then he looked 
at the girl and at Daniel again. 

"With your permission, Sefior Judge . . ." The lawyer came 
forward, holding his brief determinedly. "If we have finished with 
the sentimentalities, with your permission . . ." 

"Certainly. That we hear from the law!" 

"If you had read my brief, the point is simple. The girl is pregnant 
and fixes the responsibility on this boy. Yet in so far as there is a doubt 
about the girl's morality — that is to say, no proof positive that there 



DANIEL 121 

were not others with whom she had relations — and certainly it is 
obvious that the girl went very willingly, that is to say, there was a 
lack of morality on both sides ..." 

Senor G6mez winced with closed eyes, as one who hears chalk 
rasping on a blackboard. 

"Licenciado," he said, "will you do me a favour?" 

"If it is possible, Sefior Judge." 

"Will you stop braying?" 

"If the judge is pleased to make sport of this " 

"No, it is you who are making sport of this. Because the matter 
is serious, more serious than you lawyers in your legal myopia will 
ever see. But I who sit here day after day and see the homeless children 
that come to this desk, children of unions such as this one we have 
here, I believe I am in a position to know how serious it is. You 
mention the lack of a sense of responsibility, and I say: Precisely. 
That is what we Mexicans suffer from, that is the great sickness of 
Mexico. And I say we must fight it, and I say the boy must be held 
responsible. Do you understand what I mean by responsible? In 
his heart, Sefior Licenciado." 

"Sentimentalities, Senor Judge. According to the law " 

"Vaya! The law! That doesn't enter here, but I'll tell you what 
does. Tell me, how many homeless children are there in our city of 
Mexico ?" 

"I would be very pleased if you told me, Sefior Judge." 

"Que va, that I must tell you! When the shame of it is known to 
all of us. And you wish to add another?" 

"And the boy must be made the scapegoat?" 

"He must be taught, as all our young men of Mexico must be 
taught." 

"Sociology, sefior." 

"As you wish to call it." 

"Pues, if your mind is made up . . ." 

Daniel's father leaned across the desk. "If you please, Sefior 
Judge, the boss is waiting for me. If the judge will only say, anything 
that he wishes me to do . . ." 

"Yes, now we have talked enough." The girl's mother nodded 
at him approvingly, and adjusted her rebozo in readiness to leave. 
"Speak, Senor Judge! That the boy pay for the expenses of the 
baby." 

But the judge, looking at the case history, signalled 'a little now', 
and everyone waited. "One thing more," he said, turning the pages. 
"To fix the date, for the dates must coincide. How long has the girl 
been pregnant?" 

"A matter of seven months, sefior." 

"And you would say it began on the Feast of Saint Joseph?" He 
turned to Daniel. 



122 THE DAYS OF OFELIA 

"I would say that, seiior, for on that day . . ." 

They were walking through the fair, and the place was a blaze 
of coloured lights, and there was music and fireworks, and they had 
bought bags of confetti and ridden on the carrousel; and now they 
were strolling past the booths and looking at the things to buy, and 
at the little clay ducks that people were shooting at. And Daniel 
held her close, and it was late and they did not want to go home. 

"Is there anything else you want, Luisita?" 

"No, we have done everything." 

"Yes, but can't you think of something else?" 

"Of what?" 

"I don't know. Something else that might please you. They 
say there are horses for riding." 

"Ah, in my tierra how I used to ride!" 

"Then let us look for the horses." 

"No, I am tired." 

"You are scared." 

"Que va!" If I have ridden the wildest! I would whisper to the 
horse in his ear with affection, and then he understood me and I 
was never afraid." 

"I would like to see you ride, Luisita." 

"Here in the city one cannot. It is not a modest thing here. It 
is only for making a show of oneself like the charras." 

"I will buy you a charra costume. I take it on myself to buy it. 
A long skirt with silver bangles." 

"Such nonsense, Daniel. I would be ashamed to wear it." 

"And then you will have your picture taken and give it to me." 

"Yes, I have been thinking of that." 

"Thinking of what, Luisita?" 

"That I would go to the Alameda and have my picture taken." 

"Then I think you must have a sweetheart." 

"The things you imagine!" 

"Yes, you have a sweetheart in your tierra. Why did you deceive 
me? I am going to your tierra to fight with him. I will challenge 
him. I will have it out with him. Tell me: what is he called and 
how does he look? Is he handsomer than I ?" 

"You are making fun of me, Daniel. I swear that I have no 
sweetheart." 

"And this of the picture?" 

"I was only thinking of it." 

"But for me, Luisita, not for that other one in your tierra." 

"But there is no other one, Daniel. You will see, I will give you 
my picture." 

"Do you promise it?" 

"Yes, to-morrow I will go to the Alameda." 

"No, we will go to Xochimilco. We will go on Sunday." 



DANIEL 123 

"On Sunday I cannot. We have promised to hear a Mass for the 
repose of my father." 

"That cannot take the whole day. We will go after the Mass." 

"If my mother allows it. She does not approve of excursions." 

"I will speak to your mother. I take it on myself to speak to her. 
You will see." 

"Just imagine, I have never been to Xochimilco." 

"Nor to the Castle either?" 

"Not there either." 

"Nor to the Desert of the Lions?" 

"Even less." 

"Then I think you know very little of the city. Here we are in 
the metropolis, and you do not know the things that there are for 
diversion." 

"And you — have you seen so much?" 

"I am newly arrived. I have not had time. But I think of going 
to Xochimilco, and to the Desert of the Lions, and to the Convent 
of Acolman " 

"Then go. There is no problem." 

"But these are not places for seeing alone." 

"Then you lack for women?" 

"No, no lack of that. But how if one should please me more than 
another?" 

"Ah . . . then you have a sweetheart." 

"No, I swear it. It is you who have a sweetheart. There in your 
tierra." 

"How jealous you are! I am afraid of you, Daniel. How you 
frightened me to-day when I came from the house, after leaving the 
little white ones. Ay, Daniel! How you follow me!" 

"Because I love you, Luisita." 

"You are raving and I do not believe it." 

"Do not believe it, but I say that I love you." 

"Look, there are drops of rain." 

"Yes, it is beginning to rain." 

"Let us go, they are waiting for me." 

"Look, Luisita. That you do not go home to-night " 

"No, they are waiting for me and it is beginning to rain." 

"Here . . . there is no rain here. Stand close, Luisita, come under 
my jacket." 

"Ay, Daniel! What do you want of me? I am afraid . . ." 

"I want to please you, nifiita. You will see. You will see how 
I will please you and you will not be afraid." 

"You follow me and follow me! I am afraid of you, Daniel. I 
think you will do me an injury. I think you will kill me." 

"No, I will please you, Luisita. How I will please you! My heart 
and my life, my lovely little heaven, how I will please you!" 



124 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

They stood under the awning and the rain came down and they 
could not see the lights of the fair. Some musicians came out of the 
cantina. "What do we play you?" they called mockingly, seeing 
Daniel and the girl. Then they ran through the rain, bent over, pro- 
tecting their instruments. "I will please you. My heart and my 
life, lovely little heaven, how I will please you. ..." 

"Then it was there in Tacubaya, on the Feast of Saint Joseph ?" 
said Senor G6mez. 

"It was there," Daniel answered, "and after that the girl did not 
want to go back to the mother, so that we were obliged to stay in 
Tacubaya, until the failure of money caused her to return to the 
mother, after which I saw her with less frequency and with great 
difficulty, considering the watchfulness of the mother. But the first 
night, certainly, was there in Tacubaya on the Feast of Saint Joseph 



"Senor, he held me! He would not let me go. It was only out 
of fear, senor ! Because of the wild things he said — of how he would 
kill me if I did not stay with him." 

Daniel folded his arms and looked at her, sadly patient. "And 
it was fear afterward, too, then? When you followed me, Luisita? 
Yes, ask her, senor ! That she tell you how, when I had tired of the 
thing — how she pursued me and came to me there where I was watch- 
ing at night at the building on Atoyac, and molested me that I should 
go with her, and moreover because of this matter of the baby. . . . 
So that I was obliged to abandon my employment and go with her, 
and since, as it happens, I have a sweetheart and not wishing any of 
this to come to her ears. ..." 

Senor G6mez threw his pencil down triumphantly, as one who 
reaches the solution of a difficult equation. "There you see, licenciado ? 
There's your proof positive. The boy is compromised with one girl 
and goes off with another. Lack of responsibility, and therefore I 
say " 

The lawyer shrugged, threw up his hands, and Gomez leaned back 
to announce his decision while the mother nodded approvingly: 
"Yes, Senor Judge, that the boy pay for the expenses of the baby. 
Nothing more." She figured it out. It came to sixty pesos. 

There were formalities. Senor Gomez lectured Daniel on his 
conduct, and made the girl promise that she would keep the baby 
and care for it. Then Daniel's father counted out the sixty pesos, 
and put it on the desk, and Senor Gomez gave it to the girl's mother. 
"And you two" — he looked at Daniel and the girl. "That you refrain 
from molesting each other in the future." He was very severe about this. 

"Naturally," said Daniel's father. "Why should they see one 
another, now that the thing is settled and the boy is to be married ? 
Pues . . ." He shrugged away such possibilities. 



AND ANOTHER WEDDING 125 

Then they went out, the girl and her mother first, Daniel and 
his father following at a decent distance. But the girl kept looking 
back at Daniel, and the mother had to nudge her angrily to make 
her come. 



16 



AND ANOTHER WEDDING 

indso there would be a wedding. One morning I looked down 
/\ on the lot and saw a man weaving a rebozo — a very long one 
JTm. of fine black wool — for Daniel's sweetheart. The man worked 
standing up, with one end of his loom tied to a tree and the other 
end around his waist; and everyone stood watching, while he 
threw the shuttle and changed the threads, silent and absorbed in his 
work. I had never had a desire to buy the artifacts of Mexico and take 
them home; but I found myself wanting that rebozo. For it would 
always have in it the skilful movements of the man's hands, and the 
absorbed contemplation of those who stood watching, and the long 
golden hours of the morning in which it was woven. But it was for 
Daniel's sweetheart. When the year was over, they would celebrate 
the wedding, and then the Escotos would return to their tierra. 

"My mother says, come with us to Atotonilco," Ofelia pleaded. 
"Our home there is very humble, but if it should please you to stay 
with us awhile ..." 

"No; I, too, must return to my tierra." 

"So far away?" she said. 

"As far as it must be," I answered, with Mexican resignation. 

"And you won't forget to send me the picture of the building which 
is over a hundred stories high?" 

"I won't forget." 

"But don't expect me to believe it," she warned. "No, such 
things are not to be believed." 

It was Christmas time, a Christmas of blue skies and warm sunny 
days, a period of fiestas when little work was done on the buildings. 
There was talk now that all the work on the buildings would soon 
be over. Whole blocks of new houses had been built, but now it was 
coming to an end. There would be no more work for the peons and 
all the families would have to move. Already there was a busyness 
of departure in the huts — a frenzy of clothes-washing and pot-scrub- 
bing, an airing of all the sarapes and straw sleeping mats. It was 
festive and sad at the same time; for though the huts had been poor 
shelter at best, nobody wanted to leave them. But it had been illegal 



AND ANOTHER WEDDING 127 

for the families to be living on the lot without water and sanitation, 
and now that the peons were no longer needed, the company remem- 
bered the illegality. And the families were told to go. 

"Pues, it seems it is the law," Sefior Escoto said. "For that there 
is no remedy." 

It was the night of Daniel's wedding and we were sitting in the 
hut waiting for rum, so that the wedding might begin. It would be 
a very simple wedding. Sefior Escoto had bought tequila, and the 
people of the huts would come and join in the drinking. But Daniel 
delayed, and there were long pauses in the conversation, while the 
women stared at the door, wondering why he did not come. "Daniell" 
It was Ofelia's voice ringing sharp and clear, just once far away. 
"She is calling him," said Mrs. Escoto; and then, in the moment of 
silence after she spoke, we heard the scream. It was a high, deliberate 
scream, almost as if someone had tried to sing on a note beyond range 
of the voice; then it was repeated, only this time the high pitch fell 
•on a long-drawn downward shudder, agonizing and inhuman. And 
then the silence of the night outside the hut was louder, so loud that 
it seemed as if the air thundered together after the sound had rent it. 

Daniel's sweetheart spoke first, drawing her rebozo around her 
face, pale as death. "Daniel!" 

"That you don't go, I tell you! That you don't go!" She had 
rushed blindly to the door, holding her arms before her as if to ward 
off a blow. But Sefior Escoto held her, caught her uplifted arms, and 
struggled with her. "That you don't go, I tell you!" 

"Let me go, let me go!" she cried. 

The door opened on the blue quiet night, and she was gone, 
running toward the place where the scream had come from. But by 
now everyone was on the street, and Manolo and Edouardo came 
from the store, and everyone stood looking down the street where 
there was nothing but her tall running figure and a solitary lamp 
plashing light on her as she passed. 

"It is she," Manolo said; "the insane one who tried to throw her- 
self from the building to-day." 

"None other," Edouardo affirmed. "All day she went through 
the streets like one insane, and she went up on all the buildings where 
the peons were working, and they said to her: 'Get out, woman. 
Don't you know you are not permitted here ?' 'Does Juan work here ?' 
she asked. 'What Juan?' they said. Well, you know there is always 
a Juan on the buildings, so finally they said, 'Yes, he works here.' 
'Let me speak to him,' she said. 'Let me go up and speak to him.' 
'Why do you want to speak to him?' they said. 'He owes me money,' 
she said. 'Let me go up and speak to him.' And then, because she 
behaved like one insane, they said: 'It is not allowed to go up. You 
may speak to him when the peons leave.' 'And when do they leave?' 
she asked. 'At seven,' they said, and she went away saying she would 



128 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

be back at seven. And she did this over and over like one insane, 
trying to get to the top of the buildings — that she might hurl herself 
down." 

"But now, obviously, she has done it," Manolo concluded. 

"Pues ..." Senor Escoto was lighting a cigarette. The match 
flared unsteadily in his cupped fingers. "It is no great matter. She 
cannot be hurt much, for look you, all the buildings are low." He 
threw the match away, pocketed the cigarettes, and sauntered off. 
A few of the men followed him. "It is no great matter," he called 
back negligently, as if already announcing what he had found. 

"No, it can be no great matter," Manolo echoed with authority. 
"She will be hurt, nothing more." He went back to lock the door 
of the bakery, and the group dissolved from its frozen compactness. 
More of the men followed Senor Escoto, and the women called to the 
children and made them stay close, protecting them with their rebozos. 

Ofelia's mother stood leaning against the hut, her face hidden in 
shadow. "And you saw her?" she asked of Edouardo. 

"Certainly I saw her. A young woman, very pretty, but pale, 
pale with this rage to destroy herself. She came into the store " 

"Ah, you spoke to her?" 

"Certainly I spoke to her, for she came into the store. 'What do 
you wish?' I asked, but she was incapable of answering, staring at 
me like one who has taken leave of her senses. 'Is there a Juan here?' 

she said, indicating the buildings where the peons were still working 

j» 

"It was Juan she wanted," Mrs. Escoto mused. "Juan! Who 
would it be, this Juan?" 

"Clearly the name of her lover," the young aunt nodded wisely. 

"Clearly she was a deceived one," said Edouardo. "Greatly 
deceived in love. For this she destroyed herself." 

"Ah . . . poor woman, to destroy herself for love." 

"Pues, when one is deceived . . ." 

We heard the shriek of the siren, and then we saw the ambulance 
turning in, far away at the corner where Daniel had once been watch- 
man. 

"That Ofelia!" Mrs. Escoto said irritably. "Where will she be?" 

After a while we saw her. She came down the dark street alone, 
walking as calmly as if she had only been to market; but with the 
story on her lips — Daniel's story, though she did not know that, and 
the story of her own courage, too. She told it over and over, and 
she told it again when we were sitting in the hut, waiting by candle- 
light for the return of the others. They had taken Daniel to the 
police station for questioning, and his sweetheart and Senor Escoto 
had gone along. 

' "That you take me too!" I said, for I saw it all and I know 



AND ANOTHER WEDDING 129 

Daniel was not to blame. But imagine, they would not let me go 
along. They pushed me aside for a little one, and they would not 
let me go, though I could have told them exactly how it was. She 
was standing there where it was dark, near the wall, and I noticed 
it as I passed the first time looking for Daniel. And it must have 
been a long time she stood there, for when I came back she was just 
going into the building. I saw it — something black that disappeared 
into the door, and I thought maybe it was Daniel and I went in, too, 
but only a little way so as not to lose the light from the street. Sacred 
heart! What a fright I had when she turned and looked at me, pale 
as death itself and with two great eyes staring, but silent, silent, so 
that I thought it was a ghost. And then it entered my mind she had 
come to steal something and they would blame it on Daniel who had 
been the watchman there. 'What do you want?' I said. 'Whom 
are you looking for?' I said. But she did not answer, only stared at 
me. Sacred heart, how she looked at me, that my blood stood still! 
Then she turned and went upstairs and it was dark, dark, and I had 
to feel my way, sliding my hand on the banister and afraid to touch 
her, because still I was not sure that she was not a ghost. 'That you 
tell me what it is!' I said loudly, but not a word, not a sound; and 
I crossed myself twice and said a prayer to myself. Then we came 
to the top of the stairs and she stood a moment holding her hand to 
her throat. She made a queer sound with her throat, but she was not 
crying, it was as though she felt pain. And I thought I would faint 
with fear and I wanted to run down again, but for the fear of turning 
my back to her, for by now I knew she was a crazy one, from whom 
there is always great danger." 

"You did wrong," Mrs. Escoto said severely. "You did wrong 
not to call someone. You see?" she turned to me. "It is always so 
with the child! Presuming and meddlesome in everything! And how 
if the woman had really done you an injury?" 

"Ah, but since she was bent on destroying herself," the young 
aunt mused. 

"It entered my mind," Ofelia continued, unabashed. "I do not 
know how, but this very thing entered my mind — that she proposed 
to destroy herself, and then I felt no fear, but only the thought that she 
must not do it. We came to the roof and without fear I touched her, 
but she shook me away, still making that strange sound in her throat, 
and she walked to the edge, but swiftly, swiftly, with long strides, 
and then " 

She could tell it calmly now, though at first she had faltered. 
There was a moment when everything seemed to happen at once. 
Ofelia, too, ran to the edge of the roof, looking down fearfully at the 
street. She saw Daniel walking on the street, very unconcerned, with 
his hands in his pockets, and she called in her terror: "Daniel!" And 
just as she called, the woman's scream pierced her ears, and looking 



130 THEDAYSOFOFELIA 

around she saw only a great emptiness, the white emptiness of the 
moonlight, and no sound, no sound, until Daniel came bounding up 
the stairs. 

"I had to shake the child to get the story from her," Daniel said 
later. He had been released by the police, for they could find no 
connection between this act of a crazy woman and the fact that 
Daniel had once been watchman at the building. "I had to shake her, 
for she was standing there crying, and pointing — pointing ..." 

And the talk dissolved into censure for Ofelia, who had been pre- 
suming and meddlesome again, and so witnessed something it would 
be better never to have seen. As for the woman, she would not live. 
She had impaled herself on the spikes next to the building, where 
they had made forms for pouring cement. 

The story became a seven-days' wonder, to be told over and 
over again to the curious who came to stare at the building. The 
story of Luisita — poor Luisita who even in her rage to destroy herself 
had remembered Sefior Gomez' last warning: "That you two do not 
molest each other" And she had gone asking for Juan, and tried to 
destroy herself near the hut where Daniel might perhaps see her and 
pity her. And failing that, she had gone to the building, the same 
place where I had seen them together that night of the fireworks, 
and where they must have been together many times. 

Neither Daniel nor his father ever mentioned her name, and yet 
I was sure it was Luisita. At times I was sure, and at other times it 
seemed a mystery. Like the question of the robberies. But whenever 
I think of the robberies, the memory of Ofelia comes to reproach me. 
She was sure they were not the work of Daniel or her father, and she 
was wise in all things. 

Dear Ofelia! I was sorry, to leave Mexico and I was sorry to. leave 
you, and though we promised to write I have only sent the picture 
of the building over a hundred stories high. Perhaps it hangs now 
in the hut and you point to it as evidence of the wonders, the incred- 
ible wonders of my tierra. Or have you left the city and gone back 
to your tierra ? I have promised myself to write and find out, and 
some day I shall, since in this uncertain world somehow the only thing 
we seem to accomplish is finally to write the long-delayed letters. And 
I shall address the envelope: 'Senorita Ofelia Escoto, Atotonilco, 
Jalisco' — adding in the corner, 'The house is known', which is the 
way one addresses letters to a village in Mexico. 

That time on the trip home, when the bus stopped in the tropics 
of Jacala . . . We sat having lunch in the hot shade of the hotel 
porch and the musicians came over and the whine of the violins 
sounded familiar. They played us the song of your tierra. Tn that 
Atotonilco the orange trees are in flower, the maidens appear like 
little angels of God . . .' I was only a few hours away from the house 



AND ANOTHER WEDDING 131 

on Atoyac, but already it seemed a long time, and this song of your 
tierra was a reminder of something far in the past. But how much 
longer it seems now whenever I am reminded! Here in the cold 
North there is a man who walks back and forth on the corner near 
my house. You would laugh to see him wearing a Mexican sombrero, 
here where there is no sun on the street, where it is cold, cold. He 
carries signs in front and in back printed in big red letters: eat at 
pedro's, Mexican chile. And he looks very hungry and the signs 
do not warm him. But whenever I see him I seem to hear again the 
song of your tierra, and I wonder if I shall find you again when I 
return to Mexico. Probably I will pass you in the market-place 
without knowing. You will be like all the others; — an anonymous 
rebozo in the market-place, a maid, as you wished to be, carrying the 
tortillas for some well-to-do family; and very proud of your servanthood, 
very pleased to be scrubbing and scouring and fetching and carrying 
for them. And then you will marry and have many children, for one 
goes on having children until the thing finishes itself. It might have 
been different if you had gone to school. But that could not be, and 
perhaps it is just as well, for 'who knows?' I remember how you 
used to say that, like a Mexican. I remember you whenever I think 
of Mexico. Dear Ofelia . . . 




m 



mm 



■■ 



ami 






H ^ NHHHHffiHH NHB 

P^lnH HI 

BjW 




^: f ?;;K7r^^;: ■ 



H 



'* : ^' .'*'£.'■ ■ 



r^i 



SI El H 

■I Hi 

H Pi ■ 

m^nnmiiH ih 

■EKH 

■■H ' I HH 






■ 






.HHH 



■ 



«95Si 

H 









■HH 



■■ 



■ 



■v 




